The Urban Planetary and Tokyo Modernity: Dwelling in Passing (New Studies in Modern Japan) 1666929301, 9781666929300

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The Urban Planetary and Tokyo Modernity

New Studies in Modern Japan Series Editors: Doug Slaymaker and William M. Tsutsui New Studies in Modern Japan is a multidisciplinary series that consists primarily of original studies on a broad spectrum of topics dealing with Japan since the mid-nineteenth century. Additionally, the series aims to bring back into print classic works that shed new light on contemporary Japan. The series speaks to cultural studies (literature, translations, film), history, and social sciences audiences. We publish compelling works of scholarship, by both established and rising scholars in the field, on a broad arena of topics, in order to nuance our understandings of Japan and the Japanese.

Advisory Board

Michael Bourdaghs, University of Chicago Rebecca Copeland, Washington University in St. Louis Aaron Gerow, Yale University Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University Koichi Iwabuchi, Monash University T. J. Pempel, University of California, Berkeley Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame Dennis Washburn, Dartmouth College Merry White, Boston University

Recent Titles in the Series

The Urban Planetary and Tokyo Modernity: Dwelling in Passing, by Christophe Thouny Theorizing Post-Disaster Literature in Japan: Revisiting the Literary and Cultural Landscape after the Triple Disasters, by Saeko Kimura Mito and the Politics of Reform in Early Modern Japan, by Michael Alan Thornton Wild Lines and Poetic Travels: A Keijiro Suga Reader, edited by Doug Slaymaker A Transnational Critique of Japaneseness: Cultural Nationalism, Racism, and Multiculturalism in Japan, by Yuko Kawai Literature among the Ruins, 1945–1955: Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism, edited by Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda Living Transnationally between Japan and Brazil: Routes beyond Roots, by Sarah A. LeBaron von Baeyer Tawada Yōko: On Writing and Rewriting, edited by Doug Slaymaker The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections, edited by David Lowe, Cassandra Atherton, and Alyson Miller

The Urban Planetary and Tokyo Modernity Dwelling in Passing

Christophe Thouny

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thouny, Christophe, 1977- author. Title: The urban planetary and Tokyo modernity : dwelling in passing / Christophe Thouny. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Series: New studies in modern Japan | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book revisits Japanese modern literature in relation to Kon Wajirō’s urban ethnography and draws a speculative genealogy of dwelling practices in the Japanese capital defined by mobility, affect and the beautiful, in particular what Kon called “accidental beauty.””— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023041865 (print) | LCCN 2023041866 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666929300 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666929317 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Urbanization—Social aspects—Japan. | Urbanization in literature. | Japanese literature—History and criticism. | Sociology, Urban—Japan. Classification: LCC HT169.J3 T49 2024 (print) | LCC HT169.J3 (ebook) | DDC 307.760952—dc23/eng/20231018 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041865 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041866 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction: Dwelling in Passing

1

Chapter 1

Encounters with the Planetary: Mori Ōgai’s’ Cartographic Writing

35

Chapter 2

The View from the Near-Suburb: Tayama Katai’s Musashino

67

Chapter 3

From Production to Attitude: Cartographic Heterotopia in Kafū’s Fair-Weather Clogs109

Chapter 4

Of Modernology and Parks: Kon Wajirō’s Theory of Urban Ecologies

153

Chapter 5

The Urban Voyant in the New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo

193

Conclusion: Wandering Lines

237

Bibliography245 Index265 About the Author

271

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v

List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Tōkyō Hōganzu (original). Figure 1.2 Express Survey Map—Ushigome-ku and Surroundings (Geospatial Authority of Japan). Figure 1.3 Express Survey Map—Shizu: View of a Grave and a Shrine (Musashino-ku) (Geospatial Authority of Japan). Figure 1.4 Express Survey Map—Shizu: View in Perspective of a Farmhouse in Ichigao (Yokohama) (Geospatial Authority of Japan). Figure 2.1 Musashino (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 3) (National Diet Library). Figure 2.2 Bubaigawara Old Battle Field (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 77) (National Diet Library). Figure 2.3 Grave of Itō Hirobumi (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 207) (National Diet Library). Figure 2.4 Kokubunji (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 73) (National Diet Library). Figure 2.5 Nihonbashi (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 12) (National Diet Library). Figure 2.6 Tama River (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 24) (National Diet Library). Figure 3.1 Edokirizu Owariya—Map of Nihonbashi Southern Area. Bottom right: Eitaibashi Bridge (1860) (Tokyo Metropolitan Library). vii

36 42 47 48 94 95 95 96 96 96 127

viii  v  List of Figures

Figure 4.1 Index, Records of Mores from the Early Summer (1925) (Kogakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive). Figure 4.2 Traffic Map of a House (1931) (Kogakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive). Figure 4.3 Picnic Groups at Inokashira Park (1926) (Kogakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive). Figure 4.4 Distribution Map of Suicides in Inokashira Park (1925– 1927) (Kogakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive). Figure 4.5 Where Western Clothes Wear and Tear (Junior High School Student) (Kogakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive). Figure 4.6 How Rice Bowls in a Popular Restaurant Break (1926– 1927) (Kogakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive). Figure 4.7 City and Country (Geddes, 1915, 96). Figure 5.1 New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo—Cover (original edition). Figure 5.2 New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo—Case, Front (original edition). Figure 5.3 Tokyo Guide for Lone Travelers—Table of Contents (National Diet Library). Figure 5.4 Barracks in Front of the Imperial Palace (September 9, 1923) (Kogakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive). Figure 5.5 Barrack Covered in Coal Tar (Kogakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive). Figure 5.6 New Barrack Style (Kogakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive). Figure 5.7 Survey of Ginza and Asakusa September 1929 at 4 p.m. (original edition). Figure 5.8 Empty Apartment in Nippori (original edition). Figure 5.9 The Same Nippori Apartment Occupied by a Young Male Artist (original edition). Figure 6.1 Ant Trails (Kōgakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive).

159 160 161 162 163 164 181 194 195 203 207 210 211 223 226 226 239

v

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a long journey, building up on an ongoing research project about Japanese urban modernity across three continents and academic worlds, Europe, Japan, and North America. I owe a lot of gratitude to the people who crossed my path during these years, kept me afloat and motivated, and kept widening my intellectual and affective horizons. First, I want to thank Thomas Looser for his generous support over the years as my thesis director and Sarah Nuttall for encouraging me to write this book during a global pandemic and giving me the directions I needed to turn a dry PhD dissertation into a readable book. I also am very grateful to Christopher Lehrich for masterfully editing the manuscript. This book started when I first went to Japan in 1998 as a fourth-year student in history and geography at Lyon II Lumières University. I am grateful to Christine Cornet and Philippe Pelletier in particular who gave me the main orientations of my present work, the urban, waters, and a concern for the political valency and value of knowledge production and education. As I started my graduate studies at McGill University, I then had the chance to work under the supervision of Thomas Lamarre, Thomas Looser and Anne McKnight, whose generous, critical, and speculative minds had the longest lasting influence on my research and thinking until today. During this time, I was also able to study at Hitotsubashi University’s Faculty of Sociology and I am grateful for the ongoing support of Professor Machimura Takashi and my classmates in his seminar in urban sociology, in particular Takata Kei. The years I spent there were formative at many levels, and I remember in ix

x  v  Acknowledgments

particular that day Professor Machimura suggested Kon Wajirō as a possible research project, suggestion I dismissed at first and picked up a few years later as the central focus of my PhD dissertation and this book. I am also thankful for the generous funding I received then from the Japanese Ministry of Education. My last years of graduate studies at New York University were decisive for completing this project, and I want to thank the dedicated and inspiring scholars I met there in particular Peter Button, Yukiko Hanawa, Harry Harootunian, Rebecca Karl, Keith Vincent, and Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto. All of this would not have been possible though without the ongoing support and the stimulating exchanges with NYU’s East Asian Studies Department’s graduate students, Ariel Acosta, Lorraine Chi Man Wong, April Goehrke, Phil Kaffen, Jennifer Dorothy Lee, Joel Mathews, Esther Susan Schaffler, Julian Suddaby, Max Ward, along with fellow travelers Oida Yoshiki and Ryōji Satō. I also want to thank Tomi Suzuki for giving the basis I needed to research Japanese literature in her modern Japanese literature seminar and her graduate students Pear Pitarch Fernández, Nate Shockey, Daniel Poch, Shiho Takai, Anri Yasuda, Christina Yi, and Hitomi Yoshio, among others. This book started taking form when I moved back to Japan in 2012, one year after 3.11, and my interest shifted along with others toward issues of the planetary and urban experiences. I am thankful for the continuous support of Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto and Toshiya Ueno who kept pushing me to write and find more generative ways to relate the present to the past and its future. The Planetary Love Workshops that we started in 2013 and are still ongoing have been key to this project as we discussed contemporary academic trends to find ways to reopen the claustrophobic space we lived in then, and still today. I am grateful for the support I received from my colleagues at the University of Tokyo’s Global Communication Research Center: Veruska Cantelli, David Casenove, Lucy Glasspool, Yelena Gluzman, Jillian Healy, Sawako Nakayasu, Sharity Nelson, and Flavio Rizzo. And I thank all the participants of the workshops until today, Andrea Gevurtz Arai, Kayo AbeAuestad, Cécile Brice, Helena Čapkovà, Ramona Handel-Bajema, Davinder Leslie Bhowmik, Brian Hartzeim, Christine Marran, Anne McKnight, Lindsay Rebecca Nelson-Santos, Shunsuke Nozawa, Saeko Kimura, Kate PageLippsmeyer, Yukiko Shigeto, Doug Slaymaker, Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Ayako Takamori, Tadahito Yamamoto, and Alex Zahlten, among many others. I am also grateful to members of the Asia Theories Network (ATN), Joff Bradley, Vincenz Cerrano, Chun-Mei Chuang, Oscar Companones, David Theo Goldberg, Hitomi Koyama, Woosung Kwang, Alex Taek-Kwang Li, Hung-Chiung Li, Kwai-Chung Lo, Sarah Nuttall, and Otobe Nobutaka.

Acknowledgments   v  xi

ATN has become a needed intellectual forum for honestly engaging with the present and reopen it to a valuable future across academic disciplines. Numerous other scholars have been influential and supportive over the years, and I would like to thank in particular Brian Bergstrom, Michael Bourdaghs, Ryan Cook, David Ewick and Kanae Shiraishi, Mori Gensai, Aaron Gerow, Earl Jackson, Sabu Kohso, Livia Monnet, Shigemi Nakagawa, Dan O’Neil, Marc Steinberg, Kathryn Tanaka, Keijirō Suga, Akiko Takenaka, Hideto Tsuboi, John Treat, and many more I would like to name here. I also would like to thank Tanaka Noboru of the Kōgakuin University Kon Wajirō Archive for providing access to essential materials on Kon’s work. Also, all my gratitude to my Bangkok friends, Julien Nat and Fah, for all those memorable nights playing board games, moments between writing that helped me resource myself and recenter. All my thanks as well to the Hoshio crowd who always lent a sympathetic ear when needed and in turn kept inspiring my work in other more practical and generative ways. And last but not least, I thank my parents and my brother who supported my ambitions and research over the years, were always ready to listen when I needed to talk, and never let me give up. Merci! Chapter 3, 4, and 5 of this book have been presented at international conferences in South Korea, Japan, and the United States. The first chapter is a reworking of “Encounters with the Planetary: Mori Ōgai's Cartographic Writing,” Discourse 36:3 (2014, 283–308). And a portion of the third chapter was included in “10: Tokyo Heterotopia—In Search of Asia Within,” in Doug Slaymaker, ed., Wild Lines and Poetic Travels: A Keijiro Suga Reader (Lexington Books, 2021).

v

Introduction Dwelling in Passing

So only transit, transfer, translation and difference. It is not the house passing away, like a mobile home or the shepherd’s hut, it is in passing that we dwell.1

The urban question has always been the same—“how to dwell together?”— because the only common experience we share is the coming and passing of urbanites through dwelling places. By urbanites we have here to understand urban life forms, bodies as well as images and things, terrans, animals, critters, bacteria, and most importantly atmospheres. And human bodies and corpses. For before being social and global the urban question is posthuman and planetary. Written from Japan at a moment when the majority of the human population lives in urban centers, this book is as much about everyday experiences in modern Tokyo as it is a critical engagement with the urban in a planetary situation and with theory as urban theory. The urban, though always subjected to statist and capitalist apparatuses of capture, always leaks in all directions: the urban is essentially chaosmosis. And if as Harry Harootunian argues the urban becomes in modernity “a new envelope of temporal existence” “sheltering the time of everyday life,”2 we still need to understand how this envelope is continuously generated by everyday practices and in particular practices of fictionalization such as literary and ethnographic mappings of places. And how these practices can allow for a liberation of experiences through new expressive forms and in particular an ornamentalism. Looking at the work of the Japanese urban 1

2  v  Introduction

ethnographer Kon Wajirō in relation to early-twentieth-century literary mappings of Tokyo in Mori Ōgai’s 1912 novel Youth (Seinen), Nagai Kafū’s 1915 series of essays Fair-Weather Clogs (Hiyorigeta), and Tayama Katai’s 1920 The Near-Suburb of Tokyo: One- or Two-Day Trips (Tōkyō no kinkō), this book attempts to think urban everyday dwelling experiences at a moment in time, usually called modernity, when the urban has become a space of dwelling for theory itself and theory a speculative practice for dwelling in a planetary situation. The premise of this book is that urban dwelling experiences in a planetary situation are defined by “a dwelling in passing” entirely at odds with the anchoring in place, categories, and identities that defines the modern national subject. If modern urban dwelling is an ongoing experience of transit, it is then essentially subversive of the desire for the domus, that is, for a national place of origin, meaning, and identity. Starting from a critique of the ideology of the domus in the context of modern Japanese experiences, I propose “dwelling in passing” as an alternative to the national desire for the domus. I define “dwelling in passing” as an urban dwelling practice called forth by our planetary situation and defined by three terms: atmosphere, envelope, and shelter. By looking at various cartographies of Tokyo in the 1910s and 1920s, I reengage with the question of urban everyday experiences as a question of dwelling, displacing the centrality of the ideology of the domus. As Jean-François Lyotard argues in his classic essay “The Domus and the Megalopolis,” “it is in passing that we dwell” in the metropolis.3 Building on this essay, William Haver claims that the domus is essentially foreign to the thought of the urban, which he defines in turn as “the essential promiscuity of the non-relating relation of infinite singularities, the infinite proliferation of difference.”4 To say that the thought of the urban is essentially opposed to the domus implies then two things. First, the ideology of the domus constitutes a never-ending and always failed project of capturing and arresting the continuous movement of emergence of differing urban experiences in the here and now of an eternal place of domesticity, binding the urban subject to the closed space of circulation of the national territory. And at the same time, the ideology of the domus that I argue is at the heart of any nation-state formation, needs this urban movement as its primary ground of value extraction, as the surface at which primitive accumulation can be realized anytime anywhere everyday. This implies that the urban planetary also constitutes the dwelling space that can nurture critical theory, theory as queer theory, always emerging and morphing into other forms in a planetary situation.

Introduction   v   3

From Condition to Situation In modernity, the urban is usually understood in opposition to the country, spatializing the temporal opposition between a premodern and a modern sense of communal life as what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies called Gemeinschaft as opposed to Gesellschaft. Postwar studies of Tokyo, from Maeda Ai’s groundbreaking work on urban space and modern Japanese literature5 to the 1980s–1990s Edo-Tokyo Studies led by Jinnai Hidenobu and Ōgi Shinzō, have stressed the increasing internalization of this opposition and a stronger focus on urban everyday experiences of dwelling, leading to discussions of Tokyo as a city of villages.6 This postwar understanding of Tokyo urban space was oriented toward a definition of the urban in spatial terms akin to what the Japanese writer and essayist Abe Kōbo called an “internal frontier.” For the urban has no exterior and is experienced in moments of transit, a temporality Kon Wajirō was particularly sensitive to in his early modernology studies, before his postwar turn toward matters of functionality and control of everyday life chaosmosis. This postwar development of Tokyo studies in terms of what I retrospectively call an internal rather than an external frontier (generating two essentially opposite spaces, urban and rural) resonated with contemporary urban theory, in particular Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City (1968) and The Urban Revolution (1970), translated into Japanese, respectively, in 1969 and 1974.7 In these two books and others, Lefebvre stressed how the urban cannot be defined in terms of an opposition to the country, because it articulates all relations between local places in terms of a tension between an expanding and homogenizing abstract space and the coming “differential space” of a democratic urban society. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmidt’s recent work on planetary urbanization8 builds on these ideas to redefine the urban in relation to infrastructures of material extraction and all planetary life-forms. The premise of this book, however, is that sociohistorical explanations relying on a chronological understanding of urban history in terms of stages do not work. Rather than a linear movement from one urban stage to another, as in a number of urban studies inspired from Lefebvre’s work, we should rather start from the understanding of a planetary urban situation oriented by a movement of intensification in place. This implies that the urban planetary is experienced as a space without exterior. A close reading of today canonical thinkers like Kon Wajirō, Mori Ōgai, Tayama Katai, and Nagai Kafū immediately shows that the urban experience is not a matter of stages but of a total and open experience of movement, of urban atmospheres, an experience without precedent. This implies, however, a need to understand, as did

4  v  Introduction

Kon Wajirō, urban modernity as an epistemic break with premodern urban experiences in Japan and elsewhere, a break that allowed for new uses of the past and opened anyplace whatever to a planetary movement of urbanization. As such, the modern Japanese experience is secondary. Although geopolitical tensions fueled by Euro-American imperialism did intensify this urban experience and the contradictions of modernity in peripheral places like Japan, modern urban experiences always resonate through and beside national and global spaces of movement, circulation, and exchange. Almost twenty years ago, the social historian Narita Ryūichi argued that the field of urban studies in Japan, if still fragmented, had productively evolved toward questions of lived space and urban culture, particularly in Edo-Tokyo studies of the history of entertainment districts and of suburban housing. This “second stage of urban studies,”9 building on earlier works more focused on the historical emergence of a modern urban system and the history of modern urban planning,10 was characterized by its concern for the everyday. However, Narita uncritically applied Lefebvre’s linear narrative of the modern city, from “the dismantling of old cities” to the “urbanization of cities” and finally “the urbanization of society,” forgetting that Lefebvre was first a Nietzschean with an understanding of historical development more complex than the historian’s teleological narrative. This is clear in his use of the concept of transduction, always implying a movement back and forth between the future and the past. Narita’s narrative is problematic because linear, teleological, and in the end only concerned for a Japanese experience of modernity that would somehow replicate a European story. The endpoint is Japan, never an urban society opened to its planetary situation. For this reason, I argue that it is necessary, as always in Japanese studies, to displace the debate from the fetish of Japanese particularism to an understanding of Japanese urban experiences as local expressions of a planetary situation. My approach thus expands on Narita’s, with a stronger emphasis on urban dwelling experiences and the subjectivity of dwelling places, or rather, of dwelling forms. Rather than looking at individual lives, I consider here various modes of individuation of urban places, modes of individuation that are not of a person, an object, a subject, but rather “the individuation of an hour of the day, a region, a climate, a river or wind, an event.”11 This implies as well reversing the narrative of urbanization, or rather, starting from the urban emerging from a planetary space of movement and change always in excess of national narratives and capitalist captures. Starting from these premises, this book is a speculative genealogy of Kon Wajirō’s urban thought from the late Meiji to the postwar Showa era. The tension between use and pleasure is, I argue, central to the work of this

Introduction   v  5

Japanese architect and urban ethnographer, from his post-1923 collective studies of modern everyday life, dubbed Modernology, to his postwar work on the efficient management of the household in Everyday Life Studies (seikatsugaku). While there is an undeniable tendency in Kon’s work toward rationalization and control, he needs to be located within a different genealogy of urban experiences that plays on a wider spectrum defined by the tension between need and pleasure, politics and aesthetics, mapping and cartography—tension rather than chronology. By reading Kon Wajirō (1888–1973) alongside three Japanese literary figures, Mori Ōgai (1862– 1922), Tayama Katai (1872–1930), and Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), this book proposes a different genealogy of modern urban experiences and theory in Japanese modernity, one that displaces the modern state’s nostalgic desire for the lost home and its narrative of alienation and victimization, a speculative genealogy of historical answers to an insistent planetary situation. In these Japanese texts, I find a radical ethical engagement with the historicity of an urban everyday emerging from a planetary situation of coevalness. This engagement is ethical because uncompromising in its speculative embrace of the historicity of planetary urban everyday experiences. Unfortunately, this ethical engagement is always hidden by the desire to locate these writers within a national narrative of development and progress or of national resistance against modernity.12 As I revisit these wellknown Japanese urban thinkers, I show how their speculative use of fiction is not so much concerned with a national experience of loss in a global context of imperial wars as it is with the unground of a planetary urban experience of movement and change. While they do register their geopolitical condition and at times get caught in its alienating narratives, these writers nevertheless articulate other cartographies of the everyday that cannot be entirely captured by the national rhetoric of the lost home. I thus argue for the need of fiction and speculation, or rather of speculative fiction, as a cartographical practice that allows us to engage with a planetary urban movement, not as a social problem—a determinative condition bounded by the global and the national—but as a generative situation of collective experiences. The distinction between a situation and a condition, explored particularly in chapter 1 on Mori Ōgai’s cartographic writing, is an answer to recent critiques of contextualization in literary studies as “hermeneutics of suspicion” or “symptomatic reading.” In the last twenty years, the kind of situational reading that reopens the text to its sociohistorical outside and conditions of possibility through the mobilization of theoretical tools has been criticized as a paranoid mode of reading, paranoid here meaning unproductive, stultifying, and ultimately self-serving. I refer here not only to

6  v  Introduction

Eve Sedgwick’s celebrated “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You” but also to Bruno Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” and Rita Felski’s “Context Stinks!”13 Felski in particular argues for the primary role of affect in the experience of reading, interpretation itself becoming in the process unnecessary.14 Cultural studies, as Bryan Massumi explains, has too often relied on an understanding of culture and the social as a set of fixed positions to be exhaustively mapped out in order to then identify the dominant combinations and permutations possible.15 This mapping of possibilities is, Massumi argues, unable to address the actual role of affect in social formations because affect is a transindividual collective relation undetermined in its effects and effectuation. I share the same distrust for contextual reading as hermeneutics, that is, both its overreliance on a surface-depth opposition inherited from nineteenth-century history and an understanding of cultural studies as mapping practice. I am however as much weary of “context” as of an overemphasis on “affect” when it relies on a desire for an immediate, embodied, and individual experience of repair. Obviously repair does matter, but it can only be realized within a collective space of experiences and one that does not become an individual spectacle of victimhood. As Rey Chow states in A Face Drawn in the Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present,16 the discourse of affect and repair emerges from a neoliberal therapeutic culture. Chow convincingly argues that the emphasis on repair, sharing, and surface reading is all in league with an entrepreneurial selfhood that is best defined by the “coupling of a purported oppression [. . .] and the garrulous presentation of it as grievance cum satisfaction.” In other words, the entrepreneurial self as unfinished project is constantly auto-illuminating itself as a spectacle of victimhood and suffering, one that cannot be examined critically, only empathized with. As such, empathy and repair replace analysis and speculation, making it impossible for situational reading to happen. However, an affect is not individual, it is not an emotion. Affect is always historical, relational, and local; it is never the property of a sovereign subject, be it an individual or a national formation. For this reason, as Bobby Benedicto argues, we should speak of a situation rather than a context or background (what I call a condition), that is, not a container or ground but “an agent and participant in the patterns of living.”17 Benedicto stresses here that urban experiences are not primarily the effect of individual desires, echoing Kon’s approach to urban experiences through things and places rather than individual biographies and experiences. What matters is how local places

Introduction   v  7

emerge from a planetary urban situation defined by ongoing movement and change rather than individual subjects of desire, and this requires a situational reading. A situational reading analyzes the ways a text remains open as it answers locally to, here, a planetary situation. In other words, local context is essential but not as a determinative condition that would allow for resistance to a global and imperialist process of homogenization. Context should then be understood as what Isabelle Stengers calls “constraints”: “Unlike conditions, which are always relative to a given existent that needs to be explained, established, or legitimized, constraint provides no explanation, no foundation, no legitimacy. A constraint must be satisfied, but the way it is satisfied remains, by definition, an open question.”18 As such, the local is never the absolute place of difference fetishized in Japanese studies as bashosei. For place in a planetary situation emerges at the crossroad of multiple rhythms, fluctuating constraints. And as it emerges, place keeps leaking. This is why a planetary situation cannot be answered by the paradigm of the global and other variants of the global/local constantly re-emerging to fuel the academic industry of alternative modernities. On the contrary, the local is intensified precisely because of an open interconnectedness of places in excess of nested scales indexed on national territories. This is the most promising dimension of our planetary situation, a democratic promise constantly endangered by the national demand for representational governance in a global world of nation-states, what some call the planetary as apparatus of control. The puzzle of nations always works to stifle the democratic movement of emergence of urban places in resonance with each other across the planet. For in the planetary situation emerging with urban modernity, anyplace anywhere anytime can become a center of experiences in resonance with other urban places and an open planetary urban movement.

For the Urban Planetary Drawing on a genealogy of ecocriticism running through the works of Kostas Axelos, Ursula K. Heise, Masao Miyoshi, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Peter Sloterdijk, and Ukai Satoshi, I understand the planetary in terms of three characteristics: a space of alterity, a continuous field of movement, and an open totality. The planetary emerges in modernity in particular—and I assume here that there is no postmodernity, only late modernities—as an imperative situation, forcing the human population to acknowledge its entanglement with all planetary life-forms. In other words, the planetary is oriented by a radical empirical democratic movement.

8  v  Introduction

The planetary is a space of movement never accessible on a representational mode, never fully appropriated or reified, and as such in excess of any national ground of identity, what I define as the ideology of the lost home, the always-already lost space of origins of the modern nation-state. It is an imperative situation because it intensifies in urban modernity—and modernity is essentially urban—the interconnection of anything anytime anywhere, and the intensification of these interconnections that define local experiences, their possibilities of closure and opening. In this respect, our planetary situation raises the question of totality precisely because it does not allow for totalization. Rather, a planetary situation is experienced locally, in the everyday local encounters with an open totality that cannot be captured in the familiar, closed image of a globe—the very figure Peter Sloterdijk is at pains to move away from. For this reason, the planetary is not a question of scale, if we understand scale in terms of nested hierarchies of scales. The paucity of too many discussions of the planetary19 comes precisely from the inability to think beyond the closed finite globe and its nested scales, that is, beyond the planetary as apparatus of control to secure a living space for the human. Ultimately, the problem is the difficulty to think the urban planetary because of the ideology of the lost home. Taking the form of a nostalgic desire for that which never was in the conflation of the home and the national, the domus aims both to arrest the planetary movement of emergence and disappearance of urban places of experience and to displace urban subjectivities onto a national subject defined by the aporia of the subject of knowledge and the subject of action. This is the modern subject, always already alienated from and therefore desiring the domus, the eternal dwelling place of the nation, always already lost. It is this particular structure of desire grounded in the programmatic alienation from the desired place of origin that makes the ideology of the domus so pervasive and purposeful for both the modern state and the university. And at the same time, the nature of modern urban space, as a planetary space of movement continuously undermining any stable ground of experiences, is precisely what allows in reaction for this ideology of the domus as lost home to emerge and reproduce itself. In this respect, the ideology of the domus constitutes one strategy among others for coping with and capturing the disorienting irruption of a planetary situation in the urban everyday, thus allowing the state and capital to capitalize on this planetary movement to secure a national space of circulation and reproduce Japan as the “lost home.” This book examines another strategy for dwelling in the urban planetary, one working with, rather than against, its everyday movements of emergence and disappearance.

Introduction   v  9

The ideology of the domus is also at the heart of theory, when articulated from the sovereign place of the university to express a desire to order an all-too-messy real. Here I propose, instead of theory-to-be-applied, theory as a process of fictionalization, or rather, as Steven Shaviro argues, theory as speculative fiction. Theory, like science fiction, “seek[s] to grasp the social world not by representing it mimetically but by performing a kind of ‘cognitive estrangement’ upon it [. . .] so that the structures and assumptions that we take for granted, and that undergird our own social reality, may be seen in their full contingency and historicity.”20 In the series of chapters that compose this volume, I show how theory as speculative fiction learns to dwell and find a dwelling place, a shelter, in the urban planetary, thanks to a variety of cartographic practices, from novel and essay to street-watching and guidebooks. What I am addressing in this book, then, is the potentialities of collective life allowed by a planetary urban situation and too often captured and suspended for value extraction. I argue that these possibilities have already been questioned and articulated in discussions of urban modernity across the planet at the turn of the last century. For there are no latecomers, only a situation of coevalness, a simultaneity (dōjisei) of experiences that keep resonating across the planet in spite or rather because of local differences, differences that are never entirely captured by the state and capital. I thus mobilize the concept of the urban planetary to displace conventional accounts of everyday experiences in Tokyo, always subsumed under the category of the national, Japan, within a nested hierarchy of local, national, regional, and global scales. The concept of urban planetary, drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s “urban society,” allows us to reopen debates over the nature of urban dwelling forms and experiences by drawing attention to the continuity of urban space over the planet, across local places. The urban is now understood as an open planetary field of experiences, a space of interconnectedness without outside or exterior, a space in continuity with itself, finite yet open, in which human and nonhuman life-forms must somehow learn to dwell together. For the urban planetary is defined by differences: it is what Lefebvre called “a differential space.”

Urban Cartographies: Atmosphere, Envelope, Shelter We need then today a different set of conceptual tools to grasp the nature of modern urban experiences then and now, in particular in places peripheral to Euro-American modernity like Tokyo, where the contradictions of modernity are from the start accelerated and intensified given both its position in

10  v  Introduction

East Asia and its function as capital of a modern state defined by a hypercentralization of the functions of production, exchange, distribution, control, and creation. In many ways, this position has made it difficult until now to understand how urban dwellers in general, and urban thinkers in particular, have tried to engage with their everyday experiences. The concepts of shock, alienation, and the flâneur, imported from Europe, have been mobilized by both Japanese and non-Japanese scholars of Japanese urban modernity from its heyday, to identify a local and national inflection of a global movement of modernization as urbanization. All these approaches however rely on a simple concept of subjectivity, the sovereign national subject who from the distance allowed by “the view from the window”—I have in mind Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens as much as Mori Ōgai’s Dancing Girl21—can plan and order in a total and closed image a national spectacle of speed, change, and progress. This image generated in reaction another one, a nostalgic image oriented this time toward the local, the traditional, and the natural, by those called “modernists against modernity.” These two images have constituted in Japan, as elsewhere, the two polarities of the urban as a national problem and a global destiny, at the expanse of the very everyday experiences they claimed to engage, at the expanse that is of their planetary situation. If one can only dwell in passing, we need more flexible concepts of place to address the metamorphic and evanescent nature of dwelling experiences in a planetary situation. We need relational concepts for this oxymoronic dwelling experience, one defined by movement rather than the stability of a ground, a home. Drawing on Harry Harootunian’s understanding of Japanese modernity as a situation of coevalness, I will now characterize this “dwelling in passing” by three terms: atmosphere, envelope, and shelter. This will allow me in the following part to argue for the “urban planetary” as a necessary intervention in discussions of Japanese modernity and more generally the question of urban dwelling. “Atmosphere,” “envelope,” and “shelter” designate three characteristics of urban dwelling experiences in modernity, characteristics that are intensified in peripheral places like Japan. “Atmospheres” are, according to Derek P. McCormack, “elemental spacetimes that are simultaneously affective and meteorological.”22 In other words, what holds together a dwelling atmosphere is not a ground but a particular movement, an affect if we understand affect as that which moves us (as opposed to a personal emotion). Affect is a quality of movement, both spatial and temporal. For this reason, the cartographies of dwelling found in each chapter are each placed under the sign of one affect, a minor affect, or, to borrow Sian Ngai’s terminology, an ugly feeling.

Introduction   v  11

Ugly feelings are affects that cannot become the mark of a passionate soul and by virtue of this mark define a sovereign subject. Contrary to strong emotions like anger or fear, ugly feelings are “non-cathartic states of feeling, [. . .] associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended.”23 In other words, ugly feelings are not about individual expression, nor about the releasing discharge that follows a crisis to reground the sovereign subject at home. Action is suspended, and it is precisely this suspension that allows for working through a sociohistorical tension while preserving it in a temporary dwelling experience, in place and in movement. Ugly feelings are open, relational, and changing, and as such prior to the subjects they move and circulate across: ugly feelings are queer affects with a future. By turns, I will discuss Ōgai’s irritation, Katai’s melancholia (although not in Ngai’s list, I argue that melancholia is also an ugly feeling), Kafū’s paranoia, and Kon’s stuplimity as the dominant affects of four urban dwelling atmospheres. The second term, “envelope,” is turned toward dwelling, dwelling as a singular atmosphere that has to be generated, figured, and experienced. To quote McCormack again, envelopment refers to the condition of being immersed, which allows for “a shaping of things in relation to an atmospheric milieu.”24 In other words, “envelope” points at the necessarily constructed nature of dwelling places: a dwelling place is as much a dwelling atmosphere as the experience of being immersed in an atmosphere without exterior. This is why exteriority cannot allow for the grounding of a subject of critique as in conventional understandings of modern subjectivity. The point is precisely that the subject of critique is blind to its dwelling atmospheres, unless it can take a step aside, for a moment, sheltered. As Peter Sloterdijk has been arguing across his work, atmospheres function as greenhouses, shelters allowing for the incubation of humans and human societies, as well as apparatuses of control. This is why he defines modern nation-states as “auto-stressing ensembles.”25 And this is why there is an ambiguity to atmospheres. They can allow for control, today in the mode of preemption, and they can also allow for repair, growth, and love, that is, ongoing deformation. Urban dwelling atmospheres thus constitute singular envelopes, singular because accidental and temporary: they emerge as points of discontinuity in an ongoing flow of urban lives rather than as fixed places.26 And they resonate with each other. Most readings of Sloterdijk’s theory of bubbles and atmospheres refer to his provocative claim that modernity started with the military use of poisonous gas and technologies of environmental control such as air-conditioning.27 In her work on postwar Japanese media and architecture, Yuriko Furuhata for example argues that “explicating [explaining and unfolding] atmosphere reveals the existential insecurity of living in a technologically mediatized

12  v  Introduction

environment.”28 Sloterdijk does make this point but only on the premise that the human is first a technological being, sheltered in artificially designed dwelling atmospheres constituting spheres of incubation (envelopes), at a moment in history when the human has lost the protection provided by premodern social structures. In other words, if modernity is about the complete mediatization of any human and nonhuman experience, this is precisely because of an overexposure to a planetary situation, anytime, anywhere, and in resonance with each other across nested hierarchies of scale. Although Sloterdijk does not discuss the planetary as I do here, I argue that this is the basis for his argument, from his controversial essay on social eugenics to his Nietzschean argument for education as training of the human.29 This is why there is always more to dwelling atmospheres. Anxieties are real, and they are not the whole story once we start looking at the queer affects that compose our dwelling atmospheres. Recent work in queer and urban studies is converging toward queer approaches to space that, as Matthew Gandy explains, engage with urban nature on a different ground, in particular one that “rework[s] urban-rural distinctions both ecologically—through their high biodiversity—and also symbolically by challenging cultural understandings of urban and industrial landscapes,”30 precisely the approach central to Kon Wajirō. A queer urban space in this understanding is not about identities, nor about the appropriation of alternative spaces of communal life. It is rather about other practices that cannot rely on a “having,” on a my or an our, while remaining collective and open. In chapter 3 on Nagai Kafū, I expand on Gandy’s concept of “heterotopic alliances” to show how water as both infrastructure and landscape can be a motor of change of urban dwelling forms.31 In other words, how water queers the urban. What holds our societies is the tension characteristic of a singular atmosphere, a tension that can be both generative of new and reparative social practices and experiences and stultifying when falling into the death drive of the modern state. When Harry Harootunian in reference to early twentieth-century Tokyo defines the metropolis as “a new envelope of temporal existence,” he thus refers to the constructed and fragile nature of urban dwelling atmospheres that can only be transitory because ungrounded and ungrounding and therefore generative and reparative. For this reason, dwelling experiences are best figured in dynamic cartographies of space rather than fixed mappings of a national territory. Dwelling is a practice of place generative of dwelling atmospheres, and the planetary urban situation in which these dwelling practices and experiences take place is best figured as a cartography.

Introduction   v   13

Turning now to the third term—“shelter”—this new envelope that has to be understood as heterogenous, changing, and uneven constitutes a fragile shelter. In urban modernity, the home has become a shelter for “the time of everyday life.”32 A shelter does not allow for the stability of a proper place where one can accumulate capital in all its forms. For what the shelter shelters here is the time of everyday life, the temporal and by definition temporary experience that makes the everyday. As Maurice Blanchot said, “the everyday escapes. This is its definition .  .  . The everyday is always unrealized in its very actualization.”33 The everyday escapes and is as such anonymous and nameless, ungraspable while at the same time endlessly reproducing itself through repetitive habits. For the everyday is platitude, banality, as well as potentiality and spontaneity. This is why the everyday always makes the social leak and why the social is by definition an epiphenomenon rather than a container as in the Durkheimian tradition of sociology. This definition of the social in terms of its leakages and its precarious moments of experience is at odds with Michel Foucault’s work, focusing on apparatuses of control in their moments of effectuation rather than the movements of affects that subtend, nourish, and exceed them. As Gilles Deleuze explained in an early text, “it seems to me, then, that Michel confronts a problem that does not have the same status for me. For if dispositifs of power are in some way constitutive, there can only be phenomena of ‘resistance’ against them, and the question bears on the status of these phenomena.”34 For Foucault, the only option is resistance, when what matters for Deleuze is emerging practices just before and after their moment of capture, practices that compose our dwelling experiences. “I therefore have no need for the status of phenomena of resistance; if the first given of a society is that everything takes flight, then everything in it is deterritorialized.”35 The everyday always escapes its capture because it arrives always too soon and too late, because it leaks. Leakages, instead of being a strategy of avoidance as the term “escape” might imply,36 call for tactics requiring us to pay renewed attention to the details and temporal movements of our everyday dwelling experiences. This explains why Kon Wajirō’s urban studies started from this premise of evanescent, leaking, everyday social experiences to design tactics of dwelling appropriate for the Tokyoite. The urban planetary is defined by movement: it is essentially a leak in place. Living on rent in an everyday leaking from all parts, the urban dweller cannot mobilize strategies of spatial control from the stability of the bourgeois domus: they must, as Michel de Certeau argued,37 rely on tactics of survival and exploration to dwell in transit, between

14  v  Introduction

need and pleasure. This implies a singular aesthetic experience that breaks, or rather suspends for a moment, the orderly movement of the everyday into a figure, almost an event. I call this an ethico-aesthetic experience, in Kon Wajirō’s work defined by the everyday encounter with “accidental beauty.”38 Harootunian relentlessly argued in his work on Japanese modernity that the everyday is not a place but a temporality, caught between the regular and the singular yet never becoming an event simply by itself: its eventfulness emerges in its dwelling practices and experiences. “Nothing ever happens in the everyday, Henri Lefebvre once reported, except ‘everything changes.’”39 In his most recent writings on the Armenian genocide and the question of memory, Harootunian further locates the everyday apart from the eventfulness of history, despite or rather because it is the everyday that allows for both the reproduction of national history as a teleology and for its subversion in everyday dwelling practices. However, if the everyday always remains at a remove from the event, it can be figured as a cartographic event. And I argue that this is what cartographic practices allow for in the series of works I analyze. Everyday experiences are repetitive, evanescent, and only figured momentarily in unexpected juxtapositions to allow for encounters with “accidental beauty.” Ultimately, what is sheltered here is an ethico-aesthetic experience close to what Félix Guattari had in mind, emerging from fleeting encounters and never allowed to rest and gain the status of sovereign knowledge. For what is sovereign here is the dwelling form. For this reason, cartography here is not concerned with the production of an accurate representation of place, finite and limited. It is rather a technology that allows urban dwellers, here writers, scientists, and ethnographers, to rearticulate the everyday evanescent rhythms of urban places and things into a local, open image of movement, that is, into a dwelling form that can become a temporary ground of action and make it somehow possible to dwell in passing. The genealogy of urban thought explored in this book is articulated by a series of cartographic practices defined by a historical and local tension between function and pleasure. I argue for cartography as an ethical and aesthetic practice mobilized in the texts I analyze to explore and make sense of urban experiences in terms of movement and change without arresting this movement in the fantasy of a national domus qua lost home. For cartography is as much an ethical as an aesthetic practice that generates both images and things, what I call map-things. Map-things are the urban artifacts excavated from urban texts to figure a dwelling form where ornamental details draw an arabesque of life.

Introduction   v  15

Modernologio In the 1920s, Kon Wajirō argued for the necessity of a new scientific method to grasp and record the changing reality of Tokyo. For him that was to be Kōgengaku, “Modernologio,” a combination of archeology and ethnography that aimed at documenting and educating a modern urban subject in its everyday practices of urban space. The starting point for his method of analysis was the modern everyday defined by an evanescent temporality, a temporality of comings and partings of people, things, and places. Kon defined everyday experiences in relation to “things” and “dwelling places.” Because “a new mode of experiencing social reality”40 determines a new form of objectivity, Kon claimed that the everyday objects of a consumerist society (shōhi shakai) must be documented in their use. Hence his emphasis on utility41 for defining a new, empowering, urban subjectivity in Japanese modernity,42 which necessarily implied for Kon a sense of pleasure. His project was thus not a simple documentation and representation of urban everyday life but constituted an actual intervention in urban experiences by way of a singular practice of urban space, what I conceptualize in this book as a cartographic practice. In short, Kon engaged with the real in the very act of documentation of everyday dwelling practices. His surveys of urban customs not only aimed at an objective representation of the real but also realized an intervention into the urban everyday, making visible a planetary urban movement in place.43 There is a direct parallel to notice between his emphasis on consumption and his own practice of documenting everyday objects, that is, of everyday objectality, before it becomes a thing of the past. This approach is distinct from Benjamin’s archeology of modern urban life. What is interesting in Kon is how he takes the very concept of objectivity as a historical form, because for him, as for Bergson, the concept adheres to its sociohistorical object. In other words, Kon practiced a speculative use of cartography, a form of fictionalization similar to the one practiced by other modern writers like Mori Ōgai, Tayama Katai, or Nagai Kafū, in which everyday things come to articulate and be articulated as map-things, that is, as an image in its becoming-event: the figure of Tokyo as a dwelling in passing. If for Kon Wajirō the urban household becomes “the site of a new form of subjectivity,”44 we should then understand the household as a mobile dwelling form circulated across an open urban territory and actualized as much in modern apartments as in train stations or parks. Dwelling is not exclusively concerned with domestic spaces, such as houses or rented apartments, but also takes place in a street, a river bank, or a coffee shop. In fact, rather than

16  v  Introduction

discrete monadic places, urban dwelling is first about the relation between the everyday places of experiences which circulate and are circulated between urban dwellers; it is a question of dwelling atmospheres. For this reason, if we are to follow Harry Harootunian’s advice to consider the metropolis as “a new envelope of temporal existence,” “sheltering the time of everyday life,”45 we must expand the idea of dwelling to the whole of urban space, that is, to the urban planetary. The urban question becomes: what is the dwelling form most appropriate for a space that is essentially defined by movement across other spaces, peoples and things? Not only how can one dwell in Tokyo but also how does Tokyo itself become a dwelling place for a subject in transit? And what dwelling form is circulated between the multiple layers of modern Tokyo? In this volume, I draw a cartography of dwelling forms circulating across Tokyo through a genealogy of Kon Wajirō’s urban thought and practices. This project defines dwelling in terms of everyday practices of place rather than actually built forms, what Henri Lefebvre calls in reference to Heidegger “l’habiter” as opposed to “l’habitat.” As Stuart Selden explains, the place of dwelling, of l’habiter, is not separated from urban and social space, whereas habitat is merely a box, a frame. Habiter is an activity generative of an open situation, whereas habitat is a function, a finite material reality producing a condition.46 This is why it is so difficult to grasp these experiences of dwelling and why urban studies are increasingly concerned with questions of movement, circulation, transformation, and change. In a way, this is a return to urban questions 200 years old and more pertinent than ever. As I show in the first chapter, by drawing on the “circulatory turn” exemplified among others by the works of Will Straw and Bobby Benedicto, Mori Ōgai’s deconstruction of modern cartographies of Tokyo in his novel Youth is one of the earliest attempts to engage with this planetary urban situation where one can only dwell in passing. The following two chapters then in turn examine the question of urban dwelling and aesthetics in terms of urban waters and flows (chapter 2 on Nagai Kafū), suburban areas and landscapism (chapter 3 on Tayama Katai), and in the last two chapters on Kon Wajirō, dwelling forms, barracks, and ornaments. Going back to these earlier urban texts and cartographies, I argue for the urban planetary as a necessary intervention, both symptomatic of a new urban situation from the beginnings of modernity and generative of dwelling experiences in alliance with rather than at the expense of their planetary becomings. This implies in turn that the opposition between the city and the country is no longer the place to start from, if it ever was, for thinking urban dwelling

Introduction   v  17

experiences. What is prior is the open totality of a planetary urban movement that generates distinctions between various degrees of urbanization or rather different levels of intensity, of circulation, of stimulation, and of encounters. The country and the city is an opposition inherited from a particular European genealogy of urban space interested in the question of production whereas urban dwelling is about circulation across urban atmospheres. Raymond Williams’s now classic study of figurations of the rural in British literature and poetry made this point clear: premodern England contrasted but did not radically separate the city from the country; both were part of a continuous field of economic and cultural interactions. It is only with the changes brought by modernity that the rural was retrospectively imagined as a lost Golden Age by “modernists against modernity,” an innocent rural space separated and endangered by urban modernity.47 Modernity does introduce a rupture, but the opposition of the city and the country functions more as a mask in the service of the ideology of the lost home than a proper analytical tool of modern contradictions. And as Deleuze argues, contradictions are not either the place to start from. For Kon Wajirō, this opposition was never relevant in the Japanese case, characterized by more continuous relations between urban and rural spaces. Already in premodern times, the Japanese archipelago was characterized by the integration of its regions within a network of urban centers and roads indexed on the political, economic, and cultural center of Edo. When Edo is renamed Tokyo and the imperial palace relocated to the new national capital after a short period of transition, which the urban social historian Ogi Shinzō named Tōkei no jidai,48 the premodern urban structure is reproduced. For Ogi and Edo-Tokyo studies, however, this is accompanied by a loss of identity and meaning. Modern Tokyo in itself has no real identity; people come and go, without ever really thinking about staying there for the rest of their lives. And rather than addressing this quality of transitoriness characteristic of modern urban experiences in continuity with rural spaces, Ogi displaces the problem by arguing that Tokyo is a city that has been reproduced (saiseisan sareta) without ever acquiring a proper identity and subjectivity (shutaisei). Tokyo reproduced Edo but lost both meaning and identity. Meaning and identity would only have survived at the level of everyday life, of popular culture, because, having no tradition of monumentality, the basic infrastructures of the city would have remained intact. As we will see in the third chapter, on Nagai Kafū’s collection of essays Hiyorigeta, this argument for a continuity of urban infrastructures (land, roads, waters) needs to be accompanied by a proper study of modern

18  v  Introduction

urban dwelling experiences, in particular their rhythms of emergence and disappearance in place. This is precisely what Kon Wajirō, building on his study of rural houses with Yanagita Kunio, attempted to do in his post-1923 urban studies dubbed modernologio. As I explain in chapter 4 on Kon’s theory of urban ecologies, although his argument is framed in national (but never culturalist) terms, he is really concerned with urban modernity (rather than premodern Japanese urban forms) and for this reason has to be read in relation with similar ideas found in the works of Georg Simmel, Patrick Geddes, Walter Benjamin, and Henri Lefebvre. In fact, we could say that Kon’s work is in that respect more radical than Henri Lefebvre’s, the latter still caught in the “view from the window” of a modernist sovereign subject, located between inside and outside spaces.49 Kon is not concerned with liminality and the kind of position of critique and power it can give an individual sovereign subject but rather with circulation and in particular the mediation and expression of dwelling experiences by things and practices of ornamentation.

Ornamentalism For Kon Wajirō, the beautiful of the ornament is the contingent effect of a local encounter between material structures, urban environments, everyday things, and urban dwellers. Kon does not understand ornamentation and the sense of beauty it generates as the expression of an individual soul as some modernists.50 The encounter with the beautiful is always for Kon accidental, what he calls “accidental beauty” (gūzen na utsukushisa): it emerges from local dwelling practices determined by their historical conditions of emergence and contingent in their situational and collective effectuation. As such, Kon’s aesthetic of ornamentation is a particular instantiation of what the late Félix Guattari called “ethico-aesthetics,” that is, a radical engagement with the temporality of urban dwelling places, with their rhythms of emergence and disappearance.51 This interest in ornamentation is not simply a question of description, and I have strong reserves concerning the Japanese Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun’s critique of Kon’s work as a naive fascination for the commodity revealed in his endless recording of urban everyday things. For it is not the same to look comprehensively at the things held together in a dwelling atmosphere as a question of ornamentation or as a question of commodity exchange. These are radically distinct forms of circulation, the latter leading inevitably to a condemnation of everyday things as ornamental details hiding

Introduction   v  19

social relations and in particular the essential alienation at the heart of modern life. There might be alienation, but alienation does not necessarily define urban dwelling experiences, or not all of them. I am interested in tracing these other experiences that too often fall by the wayside in accounts of urban modernity. The condemnation of ornamental details is found in Georg Lukàcs’s 1938 essay on realism, “Realism in the Balance.”52 This essay has been repeatedly criticized by scholars of the margins and marginals of Modernity. In her work on film and the decorative image, Rosalind Galt revisits the denigration of the beautiful, and in particular of the pretty, to argue that ornamental details can allow “to see and potentially transform social relations.”53 Although the pretty as ornament (I conflate both here) has been associated with the feminine, perversion, and orientalism, and understood as meaningless excess, Galt argues on the contrary that the ornament follows a different system of meaning articulated by things and figures moving in and through surfaces. This movement, she explains, follows a logic of the arabesque, displacing the distinction between ground and figure central to a modernist sense of aesthetics and Western Marxism. Harry Harootunian in his recent work stresses the limits of Western Marxism in its obsession with the commodity form and alienation and argues instead for the importance of the arabesque to understand the uneven movement of coeval modernities. The arabesque, montage, and details allow us to figure the historicality of the everyday and recover its possibilities of change, precisely because modernity is, as Ernst Bloch argued, essentially uneven. Returning to Lukàcs, and in spite of his warnings against expressionism and in particular ornaments, warnings that are really about the mirages of bourgeois subjectivity when it claims to be detached and free from the strictures of everyday life, I agree with him when he makes claims for the prophetic nature of literary texts. Literary texts, and more generally any speculative uses of theory, are prophetic when they reveal figures embryonic in their time yet already announcing what was to come, not only Lukàcs’s reification and/as alienation but also, and more importantly, the urban planetary.54 In his work on queer theory, José Esteban Muñoz also draws on Bloch’s work to argue for the radical potential of ornamentation for transformation in a sort of hopology: “Ornamental has an indeterminate value that challenges the protocols of capitalism.”55 Drawing on this queer thinking, I propose to bracket Western Marxism’s understanding of things and images (such as in Guy Debord’s analysis of a postwar society of spectacle) as mediating

20  v  Introduction

relations between individuals and always already reproducing an alienated condition.56 As Jacques Rancière has shown, this reading of Marx stressing the mediation of human relations by things has more to do with a nineteenthcentury literary practice in, for example, the writings of Georges Balzac than with a Lukacsian critique of the commodity form in terms of reification and/ as alienation. The antiquary store in Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin exemplifies a desire to listen to things and in this listening to identify a failed passion for totalization.57 It is indeed the will to totalization that is the problem in too many accounts of urban experiences and, ultimately, as I discuss in the first chapter, in Rancière’s and Lefebvre’s respective approaches. Ornamentation precisely does not flourish on such passions for totalization, alienation, and ultimately the victimhood brought by loss. The details of the everyday never build up to a total spectacle of the modern capital of Japan in any of the works I discuss, nor do things become the index of an essential alienation to the world and life. We only have a series of small spectacles, aware of their constructed and temporary reality, and always leaking into another series of little spectacles. In her recent work on racial aesthetics, Anne Anlin Cheng revisits modernist aesthetics before they become reified in binary oppositions in high modernism, to oppose to the hegemonic discourse of Orientalism what she calls Ornamentalism. “When Orientalism is about turning people into things that can be possessed and dominated, Ornamentalism is about a fantasy of turning things into persons through the conduit of racial meaning in order, paradoxically, to allow the human to escape his or her own humanness.”58 As she discusses Chinese pottery and the artist Josephine Baker, Cheng articulates a theory of the surface, of the image as layered surface of ornamentation that performs the raced and gendered precisely by mobilizing the resources of ornaments that never add up to a fixed and totalizing image, because the labor of the body always escapes. The urban spectacle of speed is there, and it always leaks, from its jumps and starts, not only from its joints but also from the cracks and folds, from the myriad of details that compose our everyday dwelling experiences. One could thus say that the ornament is a dialectical image in the way it composes a multitude of fragments from the past, used objects and images, fragments only held together by the temporality of a present that is never present to itself, always leaking away. And there is more to its opening to a planetary situation, an opening that is never accounted for by any past, or rather, in front of which our pasts are left stuttering, hesitant and welcoming, hopeful.

Introduction   v  21

Urban Dwelling For Kon Wajirō, urban dwelling is an experience of transit. Urban dwelling is defined by both a tension between need and pleasure and also a temporality of progress. Kon called this capacity for ongoing expansion and improvement of everyday living conditions kakuchōsei (literally expansionness, i.e., capacity for expansion). Like Yanagita Kunio,59 the founder of Japanese folklore studies who otherwise did not approve of his one-time disciple’s urban studies, Kon understood this capacity as characteristic of the modern, in particular post-1923 Great Kanto Earthquake Tokyo. As Yanagita states in Meiji Taishō History from the Perspective of Social Change, the 1923 earthquake liberated dwelling from bindings of the past and its rigid architectural embodiment, allowing people to use this occasion to “criticize their dark and cold places of residence” and “hope for a better future.” Kon Wajirō developed his study of urban everyday life after the partial destruction of Tokyo during the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, and the tension between need and pleasure he explores is always marked by a temporality of destruction and reconstruction, what David Harvey calls a dialectic of creative-destruction.60 The 1923 disaster liberated “dwelling” (l’habiter) from the “building” (l’habitat). And while Yanagita was aware of social changes brought about by changes in material architectures of dwelling in the household, he could not like Kon see how this became a question of dwelling form actualized in both functional structures and vernacular forms of ornamentation. Kon in this respect was more careful about place and place experiences than Yanagita, who worked rather through narratives of origins.61 Contrary to many contemporary modernists—for Kon is in many ways a modernist, if a quirky one—ornamentation was central to Kon’s study, his documentation of urban dwelling places both practice of and ethical encounter with a multilayered space of experiences. The simultaneity of differing everyday experiences is characteristic of modern urban life, and the urban question as defined by urban theorists down to Manuel Castells has tended to close down these experiences in a narrative of social reproduction. The urban being the primary site of value extraction for capital, dwelling spaces are produced to assure the healthy and efficient reproduction of the labor force and more generally of a national population willing to work and sacrifice itself for the good of the nation. The separation of spaces of work, consumption, and domesticity is, along with the separation of rich and poor, a staple of modern urban planning across the planet. Yet in modern Tokyo, as in any urban center, private and

22  v  Introduction

public spaces however separate constantly leak into each other, the dwelling place becoming itself a space of circulation and exchange. This is why we should not start from the individual urban dweller but from dwelling places, or rather, urban forms. In 1931, Kon Wajirō published a short report of the survey of a twostory suburban middle-class house. Entitled “Traffic Map of a Dwelling Interior,” the article is based on a survey realized by Kon and his colleagues, in which they tried to answer the following question: “how many times a day does this woman cross each threshold?”62 The question came up randomly in Kon’s office, and no detail is given as to the woman concerned or the reasons for this discussion. The study was then to answer two questions, sociological (how women circulate within a house) and methodological (how to record accurately the circulation of humans within a house on the basis of gender, age, and function). The unstated premise, however, was that the domestic space itself was a space of traffic and circulation before any other function and as such on par with the street or other urban places. The household was composed of the wife, the husband, a son about twenty-five years old, and a housemaid. Contrary to the rented apartment, this house had an entry hall to welcome guests and a garden. Each individual was asked to make a mark each time they crossed a threshold, and Kon even made suggestions to have someone sit as quietly as possible in various rooms to avoid household members’ becoming too self-conscious of their movement. The results of the survey were rather as expected. The wife likes a clean house, as shown by the multiple passages of the wife and her maid into the toilet and bathroom. Yet nothing makes clear though that she actually “likes” this, just that it happens, that it is a banal everyday occurrence. The males on the other hand limit most of their movements to a few rooms, mainly the office, the second-floor bedroom, and the living room. Considering that it is only a four-page article, Kon makes a number of bold claims, starting with the desire to identify differences between uses of domestic spaces in Japan, China, Korea, and even Europe and North America. He uses at the end of the essay the loaded term kokuminsei, which means national trait or character, and ends up emphasizing a homogenous sense of national culture, ignoring differences within national space. The national territory remains the basic unit of analysis for Kon, which makes sense at a moment when the global market is indexed on national spaces of exchange and circulation. At the same time, Kon’s observations are about changes in present everyday practices rather than eternal cultural values, as in the nationalist ideology of the lost home.

Introduction   v   23

For Kon is during his whole career critical of national essentialist ideologies that, borrowing from the work of architects like Bruno Taut, celebrated the aristocratic and elitist simple architecture of the Katsura pavilion and dismissed popular practices of ornamentation, already echoing present-day critiques of Zen aesthetics and their association with wartime fascism.63 In fact, Kon’s threefold methodology of urban studies—collection (of data), analysis, and comparison—is only possible because of the unevenness of modern urban experiences across the planet, an unevenness emerging from a commonality of experiences of transit rather than national differences as such.

Planetary Coevalness The term “planetary” in this book does not designate a closed and finite space of dwelling for the human, as in the Kantian tradition of cosmopolitanism and more recent discussions of the Anthropocene, articulated in particular by the concepts of finitude, scarcity, and risk. Nor is it aligned with present discussions of a planetary apparatus of control. Rather, “planetary” is primarily concerned here with the ongoing movement of an interconnected and open space of experiences of which the human species is only one element and the urban the technique, the mode of dwelling of the human on the planet. This is why the Japanese Derridean scholar Ukai Satoshi talks about an “errant star” rather than the earth to address this planetary situation.64 Discussions of a planetary situation cannot however entirely ignore recent debates about the Anthropocene, and I will here explain how a planetary situation relates to and differs from the discourse of the Anthropocene. In the Anthropocene, the human has become a geological force affecting durably all forms of life on the planet. The historical starting point of the Anthropocene though is unclear: from the beginnings of agriculture65 to the Great Discovery travels of the sixteenth century, industrialization, or more recently the beginning of nuclear experiments and the nuclear industry. There is no consensus among scientists as to the validity of the term Anthropocene, although the Anthropocene debate has foregrounded in particular the role of capitalism in environmental destruction and climate change. Jason Moore thus talks about a Capitalocene, the hubris of capitalist accumulation causing the exhaustion of the commons, destruction of natural habitats and nonhuman species, and accumulation of waste, in particular plastic waste, with no end in sight.66 What is clear is that we are now in a situation that cannot be defined solely by the position of the human as sovereign subject planning and ordering the planetary surface to turn it into a habitable urban space for a national/

24  v  Introduction

global subject. In other words, the terraforming paradigm is today rendered inoperative. This desired national and global subject, both criminal and savior, emerges from extraction capitalism, colonial exploitation, and a desire for the lost national home. Claiming for an age of the human defined by human-led geological destructions is only another way to reaffirm the exceptionality of the human without engaging a planetary situation.67 As Bruno Latour argues in Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, what was assumed until now to be a stable ground of experience is now giving way. We are for this reason in need of a new sense of the local not defined by its exclusive opposition to the global.68 Indeed today our dwelling experiences cannot be accounted for by a fixed sense of place, belonging, and value, and we are forced once again to accept that we can only dwell in passing. This is why Latour is right to argue for the need to deconstruct the opposition between the Global—associated with ideas of progress, development, and futurity—and the Local—associated with ideas of the primitive, the natural, and the past. This opposition leads us nowhere, and for this reason we need a new definition of the local anchored in the materiality of place and at the same time open to its planetary situation. Latour however does not use the term planetary, preferring “terrestrial,” and this is where his intervention as usual closes the debate in a conservative representational logic. Latour’s term “terrestrial” as the new polarity needed to continue living on the planet is too limited: it is too grounded and all-too-human to engage with a planetary situation we experience now even more insistently than a hundred years ago, a situation that is defined by movement and change. I am sympathetic of course with the project of returning the global to the earth (rather than returning to the Earth as he also warns). But this does not mean that we should then reduce the planetary to a “planetary imperialism or planetary calculation,” as Heidegger did in his postwar writings.69 After all, Heidegger’s critique of modern technology as enframing, grounding his identification of the planetary with a closed space of human-centered habitability, was a question, asking for another technological relation between the human and the world. And I argue that it is precisely what the urban planetary is asking us to do from the beginnings of modernity, if not earlier. For it is first and foremost a space of change and transformation emerging locally in everyday dwelling places. What we really need, then, is to reimagine the local as planetary dwelling place, and for this we should look anew at how some Japanese urban thinkers already started doing this a century ago in places like Tokyo. In short, the planetary is neither the global nor the earth: it does not designate a finite and closed world. Nor is it simply the nonhuman reality

Introduction   v  25

destroyed by the human world, as Dipesh Chakrabarty claims in his recent publication The Climate of History in a Planetary Age.70 The planetary is first a movement of deformation and intensification in/of place, in/of the human, in/of the cosmos. Last, the planetary has no exterior because it is an ongoing movement of deformation, chaosmosis. This planetary situation makes it necessary to revisit the stories we have written about, say, Japanese urban modernity, to show that if we have never been modern, we have always already been posthuman, that is, planetary urban dwellers. Our planetary dwelling ground is an unground, which is why we can only dwell and think in transit. And the urban planetary is precisely what can allow us to learn how to live in transit. As Latour rightly argues, what is at stake today is to “discover together what territory is habitable and can be shared” with other humans and planetary life-forms;71 to discover or rather to generate new territories, here and now. For in a planetary situation that started to take shape with modernity, the urban planetary is always experienced locally in everyday experiences of dwelling. In this sense, the local is intensified, and this intensification is not simply a return to the Earth, what Latour calls the terrestrial, but a reopening in place to other planetary bodies. In short, the intensification of the local and the reach into the planetary constitute “the defining force of modern urban life.”72 A planetary situation is thus about a redefinition of the local as locally entangled in a planetary movement rather than closed in on itself in a nested scale of places. The significant character of a planetary situation is that the local does matter, that the local is intensified, and it is precisely this intensification of the local in a planetary situation that allows it to resonate across and in spite of established nested scales of control managed by the state and capital. This requires a different cartography of the urban, a cartography that is not at the service of the military and commodity exchange but rather generative of new figures of our urban dwelling experiences. In short, it requires an alliance of cartography with speculative fiction. This is why this book is not about cities but about urban spaces, the latter never opposed to any rural space and instead defined by a dialectical tension between urban and rural places on a planetary urban continuum. As we will see in chapter 4, this is the basis for Kon Wajirō’s understanding of the urban as environment (kankyō). I thus look here at Kon Wajirō as a speculative thinker rather than a specialist and for this reason argue that modern literature can constitute a different form of archive most appropriate here for exploring the tours and detours in one of the most generative Japanese thinkers of the urban. From Mori Ōgai’s tourist map in the novel Youth and Tayama Katai’s guide to the Tokyo suburbs to Nagai Kafū’s urban strolls in Hiyorigeta and Kon Wajirō’s

26  v  Introduction

1929 New Guidebooks to Tokyo, this book proposes a genealogy of modern Japanese urban thought in terms of a typology of urban places, things, and cartographic practices. The relation between modern urban dwelling and its planetary situation is a question of dwelling, and in order to understand Kon’s conceptualization of the barrack-ornament as urban dwelling form, I will discuss in turn urban circulation in Mori Ōgai, landscapism in Tayama Katai, and water flows in Nagai Kafū.

Outline of Chapters In the first chapter, I discuss the use of the tourist map Tōkyō Hōganzu (Grid Map of Tokyo) in Mori Ōgai’s 1911 novel Youth (Seinen) as a mode of engaging with the disorienting movement of urban space. This chapter lays the theoretical ground for the whole book by making three points. First, this novel engages urban experiences by articulating a shift from the urban as a global urban condition characterized by loss, alienation, and disorientation to a planetary urban situation where the urban subject becomes an irritated and irritating subject captured by the gaze of used objects, in Ōgai’s words, a bystander. In other words, this chapter articulates the shift from the modern subject (alienated and defined by the ideology of the lost home) to the urban and planetary subject. Second, the dwelling form of the urban subject, the bystander, is figured by the storehouse of used objects. Third, cartographic writing is a form of speculative writing where the urban subject is no longer a passive subject stuck in place and unable to move but rather a pathic one. This planetary urban situation, urban dwelling and the urban subject are further explored in the following two chapters, to ground the analysis of Kon Wajirō’s theory of urban ecologies and of the 1929 guidebook to Tokyo. The second chapter discusses a 1920 travelogue to the near-suburb of Tokyo (with multiple reeditions not discussed in detail here), The NearSuburb of Tokyo: One- or Two-Day Trips, published by Tayama Katai at Hakubunkan press. Katai is mostly known as a naturalist writer, claiming to write things as they are (ari no mama), and thus a pioneer of the mode of confessional writing that is now mainstream in Japanese literature—what is called the I-novel (shishōsetsu). However, Katai also wrote in other modes and in particular published a series of travelogues/guidebooks of Japan from the time he worked at Hakubunkan. And like Ōgai, who despite his critique of naturalist writing was a close acquaintance of Katai, he was interested in the possibilities of a cartographic writing. My discussion of this travelogue is articulated around three points: the relation between map and image (central to Katai’s travelogues), the position of the urban subject as observer, and the

Introduction   v  27

old station as urban dwelling form characteristic of the near-suburb. The old station, I argue, makes visible the unevenness of the global space of exchange as an urban spectacle. Katai’s mode of writing is thus a sort of landscapism, melancholic landscapes articulated by the tension between land and road, map and image, text and photographs. Chapter 3 focuses on Nagai Kafū’s 1915 collection of urban essays Fair-Weather Clogs (Hiyorigeta) and the incomplete novel The River Sumida (1909). The main themes here are weather and water, cartographic heterotopia, the affect of paranoia, and the littoral city. I focus in particular on another kind of flow, not Ōgai’s national space of circulation (chapter 1) or Katai’s global space of exchange (chapter 2) but the flows of the littoral city. Urban subjects are here leaking subjects, caught between multiple temporalities of space. Kafū is strongly distrustful of the weather of Tokyo and for this reason always carries an umbrella when wearing fair-weather clogs (hiyorigeta). The umbrella and clogs compose a mobile dwelling form, suspended between earth and sky and completed by premodern maps of Edo (Edo kiriezu) that Kafū always carries when walking. I argue that, contrary to many readings of Kafū’s work, he was a modernist and already planetary subject, for whom urban dwelling took the form of a cartographic heterotopia, the umbrella-hiyorigeta-Edo map assemblage. Rather than irritation as in Ōgai and melancholia in Katai, I bring forward here the affect of paranoia. Kafū does not trust the weather, even less the Japanese state. However this paranoia is not about manipulation and conspiracy but about managing the new flows of the capital and in particular flows of water. This raises the question of water itself and how water can narrate the planetary and planetary urbanization. Water here becomes a means to map a different sociality based on a concept of movement as flow and of urban ecologies as queer ecologies. In the fourth chapter, I discuss Kon Wajirō’s urban theory as a theory of urban ecologies. For Kon, the urban is not defined by the opposition of the country and the city. It is instead rightly understood as an everexpanding space in continuity with itself and without exterior, precisely what is today named planetary urbanization. This does not mean however that it is a homogenous and flat space, as in some readings of urban theory and in particular of Henri Lefebvre. Rather, the urban planetary is defined by a multiplicity of movements, affective movements that move the urban dweller and orient them toward a proper, if temporary, dwelling place. Kon’s urban ethnography, modernology, is usually explained as an answer to the destruction of Tokyo during the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. I argue that this is not entirely the case, because Kon’s theoretical essays before and

28  v  Introduction

after 1923 show a consistent thinking. Rather than a rupture, 1923 marks an intensification of urban movements and the question of urban dwelling. For Kon, a proper and healthy urban dwelling experience is allowed by an engagement with urban atmospheres and their expression in modernology’s urban cartographies. I conclude this chapter with a short discussion of urban parks and in particular the Inokashira park in the Tokyo western suburb. In the last chapter, I read Kon Wajirō’s 1929 New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo as an attempt to map urban space without reducing the heterogeneity of everyday experiences to the functional consumerist and national logic of a tourist guidebook. Rather than escaping into the near-suburb by making visible the unevenness of the logics of the state and capital, it is here a matter of multiplying the entry points into the spectacle of urban life and of embracing the hybridity of modern urban experiences. The barrack-ornament becomes for Kon the basic dwelling form in Tokyo, a form defined as a spectacle of speed and by the affect of stuplimity—the paradoxical combination of boredom and stupor brought about by the everyday experience of a monstrous space of movement ungraspable as a whole. Here the urban subject becomes an urban voyant, that is, a modernologist who has learned to read urban surfaces and make oneself available for encounters with “accidental beauty.” Accidental beauty is, I argue, the historical expression of one’s dwelling place.

Note About Japanese Names Japanese names are written in the Japanese order, with the surname before the given name as in “Mori Ōgai.” When writing about writers, however, I follow the Japanese practice of referring to them by their first name or pen name as “Ōgai,” pen name of Mori Rintarō. Proper nouns commonly used in English are presented without italics or macrons, as in “Tokyo.” Other Japanese words are italicized with macrons to mark long vowels.

Notes 1. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1988; reis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 198. 2. Harry Harootunian, “Time’s Envelope: City/Capital/Chronotope,” Architectural Theory Review 11, no. 2 (2006): 13. 3. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 200. 4. William Haver, The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 120.

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5. Jinnai Hidenobu, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, trans. Kimiko Nishomura (1985; reis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Maeda Ai, “Berlin 1888: Mori Ōgai’s ‘Dancing Girl,’” trans. Leslie Pincus, in Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, ed. James A. Fujii (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 295–328. Ogi Shinzō, Tōkei no jidai: Edo to Tōkyō no aida de [The age of Tōkei: Between Edo and Tokyo] (1980; reis. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2006). 6. Henry D. Smith, “Tokyo as an Idea: An Exploration of Japanese Urban Thought until 1945,” Journal of Japanese Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 45–80. 7. Japanese translations of Henri Lefebvre’s work have been much earlier than English ones: Le droit à la ville (Paris: Seuil, 1968): Japanese 1971; still no English translation. La révolution urbaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1970): Japanese 1974; English 2003. La production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1973): Japanese 1975; English 1991. 8. Neil Brenner, “Urban Theory Without an Outside,” in Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, ed. Neil Brenner (Berlin: Jovis, 2013), 14–35. Neil Brenner, “Debating Planetary Urbanization: For an Engaged Pluralism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (April 2018): 1–21. Brenner relies on an understanding of Lefebvre’s work in terms of a linear development of urban societies, which is the main limit of his urban theory. Also Christian Schmidt, Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Urban Space, trans. Zachary Murphy King (Verso: 2022). 9. Narita Ryūichi, “Kindai nihon toshishi kenkyū no sekando sutēji” [The second stage of modern Japanese urban history], in Kindai toshi kūkan no bunka keiken [The cultural experience of modern urban space] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003), 339–361. 10. Ishida Yorifusa and Ishizuka Hiromichi, ed., Tokyo: Urban Growth and Planning 1868–1988 (Tokyo Center for Urban Studies, 1988). Ishizuka Hiromichi, Nihon kindai toshi ron: Tokyo: 1868–1923 [Theory of modern Japanese cities: Tokyo: 1868–1923] (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1991). Ishida Yorifusa, Yoshihara Kenichirō, and Ishizuka Hiromichi, “Edo-Tōkyō: Sono renzokusei to furenzokusei” [Edo-Tokyo: This continuity and discontinuity], Comprehensive Urban Studies 46 (1992): 175–235. Fujimori Terunobu, Meiji no Tōkyō keikaku [Meiji Tokyo urban planning] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990). 11. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparler 1972–1990 (1990; reis. Paris: Minuit, 2003), 40, my translation. 12. The idea of “modernists against modernity” is borrowed from Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York and London: Verso, 1987). I rely here on Harry Harootunian’s discussion of Japanese modernism in History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), in particular chapter 4, “Tracking the Dinosaur,” 25–58. 13. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997),

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123–151. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Enquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225–248. Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (Autumn 2011): 573–591. 14. Felski, “Context Stinks!” 15. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 1–3. 16. Rey Chow, A Face Drawn in the Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). 17. Stephen Read, “The Urban Image: Becoming Visible,” in The Body in Architecture, ed. Deborah Hauptmann (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006), 60. Quoted in Bobby Benedicto, Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2014), 16. Under Bright Lights echoes this concern with the production of difference: “I do not want to suggest, however, that the fact of difference is necessarily the desired effect of a purposive agency, of a will to appropriate and indigenize circulating forms or of a longing to carve out spaces outside both local heteronormative space and global homogenizing space” (17). 18. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I: I. The Science Wars II. The Invention of Mechanics III. Thermodynamics (1997), trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2010), 43. 19. A good example is the Chinese philosopher of science Huk Yui, who draws on a reductive reading of Heidegger’s critique of the planetary and as such remains unable to address the present planetary situation, a situation that I argue kept intensifying since the beginning of urban modernity. Huk Yui, “For a Planetary Thinking,” e-flux journal 114 (December 2020), https://www​.e​-flux​.com​/journal​/114​ /366703​/for​-a​-planetary​-thinking/. 20. Steven Shaviro, Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003), x. 21. Mori Ōgai, “Maihime: The Dancing Girl” (1890), in Youth and Other Stories, trans. Richard Bowring, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1994), 8–24. 22. Derek P. McCormack, Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Atmospheric Envelopment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 23. Sian Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 24. McCormack, Atmospheric Things. 25. Peter Sloterdijk, La mobilisation infinie: Vers une critique de la cinétique politique (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 2003). Eric Bordeleau, “Entre biopouvoir plastique et biopouvoir de la sélection: Sloterdijk penseur de l’anthropogénétique,” Altérités 4, no. 2 (2007): 92–107. 26. For Deleuze, “singularities are turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, ‘sensitive’ points” (Shaviro, Connected, 122). This means that singularities are always an event, instantiated in a here and now and at the same time always exceeding their place and time of effectuation into planetary becomings. This is why the singular “is

Introduction  v   31

opposed to the ordinary” and why dwelling is as much about the ordinary as about the extraordinary. As Deleuze shows, it is about the leap in place from the ordinary to the extraordinary, the leap that for a moment generates a dwelling atmosphere that holds. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 52. 27. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror From The Air (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). 28. Yuriko Furuhata, Climatic Control: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 37. 29. Peter Sloterdijk, “Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 12–28. Bordeleau, “Entre biopouvoir plastique et biopouvoir de la selection.” 30. Matthew Gandy, “Queer Ecology: Nature, Sexuality, and Heterotopic Alliances,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012): 730. 31. Matthew Gandy, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 52. 32. Harootunian, “Time’s Envelope,” 13. 33. Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech” (1959), in “The Everyday,” ed. Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 19–20. 34. Gilles Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure” (1994), trans. Daniel W. Smith, in Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail, and Daniel W. Smith, Between Deleuze and Foucault (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 226. 35. Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure,” 227. 36. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the expression “lignes de fuite,” which in English is usually translated as “lines of flight.” The term “fuite” however means either escape or leakage in French. Escape points at an action, that is, a possible subjective agency that in some readings of Deleuze and Guattari becomes the road to resistance against neoliberal societies. Deleuze and Guattari’s point however is that an ontology of the social precedes as an a priori situation its practice: the social always leaks away. 37. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). 38. The Japanese expression is gūzen na utsukushisa. Although this expression is only used in Kon’s writing on post-1923 Great Kanto Earthquake barracks, I argue in the last two chapters that “accidental beauty” is characteristic of Kon’s ornamentalism. 39. Harry Harootunian, The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and its Unaccounted Lives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 10. Harootunian refers to two key texts from Lefebvre: Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” in “Everyday Life,” ed. Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 10; and Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, vol. 2, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), 41–63. 40. Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 192. 41. Utility is for Kon associated with rationality, distance, and a form of selfreflexivity, as well as an aesthetic of “technological beauty.” It is thus not simply

32   v  Introduction

functional and implies more than passive consumption. Contrary to Baudrillard’s argument that use was never the point of Marxist critique (rather all would be about the circulation of signs detached from any practical use, while use takes the form of a nostalgic desire), Kon here engages with the moment of emergence and disappearance of everyday objects and practices that compose a dwelling experience. This is then no mere fetishism of the commodity and the experience of commodity consumption, only possible on the basis of social denial, the denial of the alienation of the human from its planetary situation. On the contrary, use here is found in the tension between need and pleasure, never subsumed by any, and only in practice. 42. The attribute “Japanese” does not designate a modernity essentially different from other national modernities, for modernity is by definition always of a nationstate. Nor does it point to the existence of alternate national or regional modernities, alternate to the dominant Western model and by virtue of this, legitimate. Japanese modernity has to be understood rather as a singular, historical form of the modern, coeval with other modernities, and based on the form of the nation-state. “Coeval” here refers to a shared temporality assuring the synchronization of a variety of historical practices inside and between national spaces. 43. His group study of Ginza is remarkable for its claim to an exhaustive description of the situation observed and the arbitrariness of the data selected (one side of the street over the other one because it is less crowded and thus easier to “document”). Kon Wajirō, “Tōkyō Ginza fūzoku kiroku” [Records of Tokyo Ginza customs] (1925; reis. in Kon Wajirō shū [Complete works of Kon Wajirō] (Tokyo: Domes Shuppan, 1971–72), 1.53–108. References to this collection hereafter KWS. 44. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 200. 45. Harootunian, “Time’s Envelope,” 13. 46. Stuart Elden shows the connection of Lefebvre’s habiter with Heidegger’s wohen, usually translated as “to dwell” or in French as habiter. He stresses in particular the parallel between Lefebvre’s notion of habitat and Heidegger’s notion of a crisis in dwelling. I argue however that Lefebvre’s late work on the right to the city, differential space, and the urban revolution departs from Heidegger’s conception of place, dwelling, and worlding. This is most apparent in their conceptions of subjectivity and lived experience (individual for Heidegger and collective for Lefebvre). Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 190. 47. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 48. Ogi Shinzō was one of the main proponents of Edo-Tokyo studies in the 1980s and 1990s, along with, for example, Jinnai Hidenobu. Edo-Tokyo studies were concerned with the relation between the premodern past of Edo and the modern present of Tokyo, raising questions that remain relevant and unanswered today regarding the question of rupture and/or transition and the memories associated with these changes. This explains Ogi’s interest in the early years of Meiji Tokyo when its new status was not yet fixed and its name oscillating between ‘Tōkyō’ and (Tōkei) depending on the reading of the Kanji 東 and 京 or rather its older form 亰. Ogi

Introduction  v   33

Shinzō, Tōkei no jidai: Edo to Tōkyō no aida de [The age of Tōkei: Between Edo and Tokyo] (1980; reis. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2006). 49. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythamanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (1992), trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). Lefebvre borrowed the term “rhythmanalysis” from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014). 50. The bunriha kenchikukai (Secessionist architecture group ) was one of the first art movements in Japan. Founded in 1920 by six architecture students at Tokyo University, they argued for the value of architecture as art and the centrality of selfexpression in artistic creation, echoing the Shirakaba theories of artistic expression. Their concern for ornementation opposed them to other architectural movements emphasizing rather structure and function. 51. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992), trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). 52. Georg Lukàcs, “Realism in the Balance” (1938), in Aesthetics and Politics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertold Brecht, Georg Lukàcs with an afterword by Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 2007), 28–59. 53. Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 54. Lukàcs, “Realism in the Balance.” 55. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 56. In this respect, I agree with Steven Shaviro’s critique of Debord’s fetish of the spectacle: “Debord is apparently the only moviegoer who still doesn’t know that everybody else knows that movies are fictions. [.  .  .] There is nothing like Debord’s grand spectacle, no totalizing system of false representations that would masquerade as actual life. Instead, we have a plethora of tiny spectacles, each of which calls explicit attention to its own status of merely being a spectacle.” Shaviro, Connected, 71. 57. Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious (2001), trans. Debra Keates and James Swenson (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). 58. Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 98. 59. Yanagita Kunio, Meiji taishō shi sesōhen [History of Meiji Taishō history from the perspective of social change] (1930; reis. Kōdansha gakujutsu bunko, 2012), 102. 60. David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985). 61. I refer here to Nakatani Norihito’s Mirai no komyūn: Ie, kazoku, kyōzonnokatachi [The future of the commune: Home, family and the form of coexistence] (Tokyo: Insukuriputo, 2019). I discuss Nakatani’s opposition of Kon and Yanagita in terms of their relation to place in more detail in chapter 5. 62. Kon Wajirō, “Traffic Map of A Domestic Interior” (1931), KWS 1.387-390. I thank Professor Kuroishi Izumi for recommending me to read this short article at the

34   v  Introduction

2008 ISA-RC21 International conference of sociology when I was just starting this research project. 63. Kon Wajirō, “Kenchikubi yōshiki” [Styles of architectural beauty] (1948), KWS 9.249-258. While the postwar context might explain Kon’s more radical critique of militarism and fascism in relation to national aesthetics, it is fair to say this was an ongoing concern for him. 64. Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795), trans. David Colclasure, in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Texts on Politics, Peace and History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 67–109. For a provocative critique of Kantian cosmopolitanism opposing the Earth to the Planet, see Ukai Satoshi, “‘Dying Wisdom’ and ‘Living Madness’: A Comparative Literature of the Errant Star,” trans. Philip Kaffen, in Planetary Atmospheres and Urban Society After Fukushima, ed. Christophe Thouny and Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 21–28. 65. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021) brings an important corrective to this view of agriculture also found in the Anthropocene debate as the turning point of a humanity emerging from a primitive hunter-gatherer culture. 66. Jason Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016). 67. Claire Colebrook rightfully claims that the Anthropocene confirms human exceptionalism. Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2014). 68. “The new universality consists in feeling that the ground is in the process of giving way.” Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 25. 69. For a good overview of this limited view of the planetary see Kelly Oliver, Earth and World: Philosophy after the Apollo Missions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 241. 70. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). Despite my critique, I agree that Chakrabarty’s intervention is important to examine the question of temporality and the layering of temporalities in a planetary situation. 71. The English translation reads: “discovering in common what land is inhabitable and with whom to share it.” However, land is not territoire as in the French original. This is a mistake because territoire implies that it is generated rather than simply there to be found, an idea central to this book. A territory implies a process of territorialization, which is a form of fictionalization, of both speculation and fantasying. 72. I quote from a personal email communication with Sarah Nuttal.

CHAPTER 1

v

Encounters with the Planetary Mori Ōgai’s’ Cartographic Writing

Koizumi Jun’ichi left his inn on Shiba-Hikage. Despite the map of Tokyo he had with him, he kept bothering people about directions. At a Shinbashi street-car stop, he caught a car for Ueno, and he somehow managed to make the rather complicated transfer at Suda to another car. Mori Ōgai, Youth (1910) The important thing is not the final result but the fact that a cartographic method coexists with the process of subjectivation, and that a reappropriation, an autopoiesis of the means of production of subjectivity, [is] made possible. Félix Guattari, “Subjectivities: For Better or for Worse” (1990)

Published in 1910–1911 by Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), Youth1 begins with the classic Meiji scene of the provincial young man lost in Tokyo. When the novel starts, Koizumi Jun’ichi arrived the previous day from the island of Kyūshū and must now find his way in the Japanese capital to realize his dream, becoming a writer. With the help of the Tōkyō Hōganzu map (figure 1.1), he easily reaches the pension where lives his would-be mentor the naturalist writer Ōishi Kentarō. But Ōishi is still asleep and cannot meet him. As he learns to inhabit this new urban everyday, Jun’ichi gradually comes to realize the impossibility of becoming someone who writes “like a god.”2 Although often judged a failed bildungsroman, a pastiche with “lack of characterization, plot or structure,”3 this novel should, as Tomoko Aoyama argues, be read as “a meta-fiction that exploits alternatives to the conventional and contemporary, i.e. late Meiji, fiction.”4 By staging a fantasy of modern urban life, Ōgai subverts in Youth both the rhetoric of interiority of confessional literature and the narrative of progress of the bildungsroman 35

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Figure 1.1  Tōkyō Hōganzu (original).

to articulate a nonlinear narrative of everyday urban experiences moving from the alienated male bourgeois subject to a world of “stranded objects.”5 As Jun’ichi learns over the two months or so during which the novel takes place, dwelling in urban space means taking part in a new situation, planetary and urban, defined by movement, change, and the new, which calls for a

Encounters with the Planetary   v   37

different process of subjectivation in literary form, what I call a cartographic writing. In this process, the novel articulates a shift from the urban as a global urban condition characterized by loss, alienation, and disorientation to a planetary urban situation where the urban subject becomes a pathic subject captured by the gaze of used objects—in Ōgai’ words, a bystander (bōkansha). Posing a shift from the modernist subject to the urban planetary subject, here called a bystander, this chapter deconflates a range of urban experiences rendered opaque by an overemphasis on the question of national subjectivity. Ōgai’s bystander compels us to reconsider the nature of modern urban experiences in terms of a planetary urban subjectivity, displacing the aporia of the emasculated male Japanese subject onto the figure of the urban bystander. Youth thus portrays Jun’ichi’s education into the urban planetary, performing the reappropriation of “the means of production of subjectivity” called for by Félix Guattari along three moments, similar to Henri Bergson’s’ Neoplatonic method of phenomenological analysis, “the stating and creating of problems,” “the discovery of genuine differences in kind,” and “the apprehension of real time.”6 Henri Bergson, a contemporary of Mori Ōgai, shared the same concern for attending to and learning to inhabit an everyday temporality of change without resorting to a representational model anchored in the transcendental space of the national home, a sovereign subject of action, and a linear narrative of progress. The three moments thus do not designate three successive stages: they are always copresent analytical moments, although each in its turn comes to dominate the narrative movement of the novel. In Ōgai and the other urban thinkers discussed in this book, cartographic writing becomes a method for engaging with and figuring locally the urban planetary. Through both his literary and scientific works, Mori Ōgai has often been credited for his key role in the introduction of the modern transcendental subject in Japan. This view of Ōgai is however difficult to reconcile with an eclectic production. Karatani Kōjin, for one, stresses the increasingly unconventional structure of Ōgai’s’ fictional works as they evolved toward a perspectival writing playing on the tension between narrative layers without any attempt at narrative closure around a unified meaning.7 Thomas LaMarre then argues that Ōgai’s writing as a whole should be given credit for its skillful navigation of the modernist parameters of experience to generate a multiplicity of hybrid subjectivities.8 Following LaMarre, I understand Ōgai’s “strict policing of the distinction between immanent and transcendent— between custom and beauty, science and aesthetics, men and women” in his early writings and Youth in particular, as a perspectivalism in continuity with his later confusion of genres and writing styles in his historical fictions. Cartographic writing allows Ōgai to explore other forms of urban subjectivity

38   v  Chapter 1

that cannot be reduced to the aporia of the alienated subject of action and the ideology of the domus. The map used by Jun’ichi at the outset of the novel is identified in the Japanese text as the Tōkyō Hōganzu (literally “Tokyo grid map”),9 a tourist map in the manner of the Baedeker guides created by Mori Ōgai himself and published in 1909 by Shunyōdō. The Tōkyō Hōganzu makes visible the complex relation between a mapping and a cartographic impulse, respectively the ordering and the expression of urban experiences, in terms of a dual referentiality: it is both an open image of Tokyo and a selfreferential, functional diagram. The map presents the total and mimetic image of a historical space, central Tokyo during the Greater Taishō era (exoreferentiality),10 while functioning as a self-referential diagram valued on its ground of experience and effectivity, an everyday space of navigation (endoreferentiality). Ōgai exploits this tension between two modes of referentiality to generate a perspectival movement into a third space of fictionalization where it becomes possible to inhabit an everyday space of encounter with the urban planetary, between the state and capital. Ōgai’s alter ego in the novel, Mori Ōson, is “a man who writes novels and plays the way a surveyor measures land with a rod and tape.”11 The writer is a cartographer, and the cartographer refers both to a historical figure, the writer Mori Ōgai, and a diegetic character, Mori Ōson. Far from conflating urban reality with the homogeneous and functional surface of a space of commodity exchange and military circulation, Ōgai/Ōson keeps playing with the tension between the dual layers of referentiality of the map to shape a planetary urban subjectivity. Cartographic writing is performed by reading the urban text as a multilayered space of dwelling experiences. And as the author/cartographer reorganizes these layers into a series of binary oppositions, it becomes possible to inhabit the urban in a perspectival movement between the two worlds of global exchange and military circulation, in other words, between the state and capital. Place, both experienced and encountered, place as space of mediation, is what allows for dwelling in the planetary. This use of binarism does not go without frictions, which explains why irritation is the affect that colors the Tokyo map, playing on the tension between the two mappings of the state and capital, Ōgai and Ōson, the city and the country, the very frictions that can open a space for dwelling in the urban planetary. Binaries have already lost in this novel their function of stabilization (of the social), irritation opening the possibility of a new queer continuum of life, the continuum of urban life, hinted at by Ōmura, charmed by the younger man’s eyes:

Encounters with the Planetary   v   39

Each time Ōmura saw Jun’ichi laugh, he thought how charming Jun’ichi’s eyes were. Just at this moment the question of homosexuality [dōsei no ai] occurred to him. [. . .] Ōmura didn’t consider himself a homosexual [written in French], yet he couldn’t help feeling that even in the minds of the most normal of humans, seeds of homosexuality lay buried. In the mind of man, Ōmura thought, there exists a dark bottomless region.12

If queer, the urban planetary’s irruption is disorienting, and irritating. Irritation is about a politics of distance, of not being too close or too far, of caring too much and not enough and not about the right things. It is, in short, the affective reaction to the intensification of the local in a planetary situation. Jun’ichi as well rejects both the homosocial continuum policed and segmented by the Meiji state and the melancholic desire for the homosexual one, never allowing them to meet, yet holding them at close range. As Sian Ngai explains, irritation is a liminal affect, not quite angry and not quite anxious, because it is a mood without any clear object or orientation. “Paradoxically conjoining an image of distance or emotional detachment with an image of physical contact or friction,”13 irritation is an epidermal affect occasioned by an everyday friction without a cause, or rather, without a form. Irritation thus calls for a dwelling form that the urban subject cannot find in the spaces of male bourgeois domesticity, for urban dwelling places are only temporary shelters. Jun’ichi is irritated by his failed encounter with Ōishi the ideal writer, an irritation then displaced onto a series of meetings with modern women that never become romantic encounters. Women in this text are punctual meetings that structure Jun’ichi’s movement within the city, encounters that never become romantic, even in denial, or sexual: they remain asexual encounters with stranded objects. Irritation is the impersonal mood that holds together Jun’ichi’s circulation in Tokyo, always slightly off, however engaging; they rub him the wrong way, however stimulating. Irritation is then also a form of resistance that opens a space of incubation for learning how to dwell and in dwelling encounter the urban planetary as a space of mediation, in this novel in the storehouse of used objects, the transitional space between his past and his future. Ōmura’s musings on homosexuality happen near the end of the novel, just before Jun’ichi leaves for Hakone to meet the enchantress Mrs. Sakai and after recalling a strange dream where “he had gone on a trip with Ōmura, and they were resting in a teahouse.” In the dream, a woman suddenly yells that a tsunami (written with the characters for “tidal wave”) is coming, and both escape to a small hill, forgetting and leaving the woman behind. Then the scene suddenly shifts, and Jun’ichi stands near a tree, his feet wet, the

40  v  Chapter 1

land “inundated with yellow, muddy water except for this one tree that stood prominently like a small solitary island.” The woman is now there with him although Ōmura is gone, “and just like Adam and Eve newly born in a ruined world, Jun’ichi and the woman boldly moved closer to one another, the body of each supported by one hand on the bough.”14 She then morphs into three other women—Ochara, Mrs. Sakai, and finally the maid Oyuki—while Jun’ichi is engulfed by the flames of passion. And as he repeatedly kept up his dream, he could so clearly sense its outlines and colors. It was as if he had grasped the dream with his very hands. He wished he could write his novel that clearly. With this thought he tried to repeat his dream, but its outlines blurred, its colors faded. Only unnatural or irrational things, like a small stone one trips over along a street, seemed to be prominent, to be so distinct and vivid.15

From Ōson and Ōmura to the multitude of urban women, it is in the end the world of inert and irrational things that allows Jun’ichi to encounter and in this encounter dwell in Tokyo. He needs an island, a temporary shelter that can hold for a while a space of incubation from which to shelter the time of everyday life, a space to start to write before all is carried away by the flows of the urban planetary. As we will see in chapter 3, Nagai Kafū faces a similar problem and instead of stranded objects finds solace in the littoral city and its bridges. Starting with a discussion of modern Japanese cartography, I articulate my analysis of Youth in three parts. First, I show how urban experiences are defined in Youth in terms of a disorienting movement that suspends the narrative of maturity and progress characteristic of the bildungsroman to reinscribe the male bourgeois subject within a planetary spectacle of urban life. As D. Cuong O’Neill argues, “Within the very first chapter of this bildungsroman, we have a protagonist whose education is deferred: the teacher [the naturalist writer Ōishi Kentarō] does not wake early enough to meet the student who seeks his tutelage.”16 Jun’ichi’s arrival in Tokyo from the country calls for a suspension of the developmental narrative of the male bourgeois subject, the national citizen whose life has been mapped out by the state ideology of risshin shusse (establishing oneself and rising in the world).17 In this respect, Youth is a powerful critique of both the rhetoric of interiority of naturalist writing and also the ideology of the lost home that grounds the definition of the national subject in both state nationalism (kokkashugi) and ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi).18 Second, I examine how Ōgai’s cartographic writing identifies differences in kind by abstracting the two hegemonic layers that order the map of Tokyo, the global movement of commodity exchange and military circulation in a national territory, and open onto the in-between of a space of navigation punctuated by a series of

Encounters with the Planetary   v  41

feminine figures. The third moment of cartographic writing consists then in the apprehension of real time, the everyday urban temporality of encounter with the urban planetary. This is realized by narrating the impossibility of a unique origin of meaning and value in the death of the mother and by displacing the homosocial anxieties of the encounter with the female urban body onto the everyday spectacle of used objects. In conclusion, I argue that for Ōgai, dwelling in a planetary urban situation relies on a dual process of learning and fictionalization that happens in the detachment from the maternal space of origins (rather than the law of the father). As depth comes to the surface, the young boy learns to be moved by the gaze of a world of objects (and not others) and to navigate a cartography of love.

National Landscapes of Movement In the immediate aftermath of the South-West War, the Army General Head Office (rikuchi sanbōhonbu), with the direct support of Commander of the General Staff Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922), launched the first systematic mapmaking project of the Meiji era. The Express Survey Maps (jinsokusokuzu) (figure 1.2) were the result of a compromise to rapidly provide the new government with reliable maps of the central urban areas of the country, namely the Kantō (Tōkyō-fu and the prefectures of Saitama, Chiba, and Kanagawa) and the Kinai (Kyōto-fu and Ōsaka-fu). This project necessitated abandoning for the time being the costly project of triangulation of the country and instead relied on previous results from the Edo era such as Inō Tadakata’s’ maps,19 along with new surveys realized with the help of old Tokugawa officials.20 Started in 1880, the project was completed in 1886, with 921 maps at a 20000:1 scale, plus a few 5000:1 ones for the Imperial palace and the area of Odawara. These maps were a hybrid composite, bringing together various mapmaking techniques of differing accuracy of formal representation. The ground for the accuracy of formal representation is first the grid of coordinates, the longitude and latitude, that not only allows for the precise localization of places but also for synchronizing the national territory with itself and the rest of the world of nation-states. This is why the accurate measurement of longitude had to wait for the invention of the chronometer, for unlike with latitude, the measurement of longitude implies physical movement and historically ends up supporting a colonialist attitude: modern techniques of surveying and mapmaking, like censuses, work on the basis of a totalizing classification made possible by an imperialist project. As Benedict Anderson remarks, “Ever since John Harrison’s 1761 invention of the chronometer, which made possible the precise calculation of longitudes, the

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Figure 1.2  Express Survey Map—Ushigome-ku and Surroundings. Geospatial Authority of Japan.

entire planet’s curved surface had been subjected to a geometrical grid which squared off empty seas and unexplored regions in measured boxes. The task of, as it were, ‘filling in’ the boxes was to be accomplished by explorers, surveyors, and military forces.”21 The integration of the Japanese grid of coordinates into the Europe-centered world map of nations was realized precisely at the moment when the Express Survey Maps project was being

Encounters with the Planetary   v   43

implemented. In 1882, the measure of the Japanese zero point of longitude located in Tokyo was calculated by the American Navy on the basis of the Greenwich meridian, and after the 1884 International Conference of Washington, Japan agreed to take the Greenwich meridian as the zero for the measure of longitude.22 The grid of coordinates of the modern map is an atemporal, decentralized, Euclidean space without any predetermined position of centrality defining a subject-object relation in the manner of the linear perspective rooted in the national subject. As such it is characterized by its a priori disregard for national spaces. Yet at the same time the territoriality of the modern map does call for a precise localization of the national territory in a global space of nation-states with new power structures. In a similar manner, the space of exchange relies on the principle of an endless circulation of individuals, goods, and affects in a global space of exchange that completely disregards national territories. And yet this global space of exchange necessarily relies on those very national territories for the synchronization and regulation of circulation. The national territory thus emerges along with urban space at the intersection of a double logic of circulation—military circulation and commodity exchange—and appears to become a natural unit, an eternal place of dwelling for the national people, a domus. This is the teleological narrative of modern nationalism analyzed by Benedict Anderson. And while numerous works have been published since the 1990s analyzing the construction of a Japanese national state and its national territory, few attempts have been made to address this question in terms of its actual ground of experience, the encounter with the urban planetary as mediated by modern cartographic practices and what I call a cartographic writing.23 The historian has thus been torn between two strategies, either absolutizing the logic of modern nationalism in its drive toward the integration of the national territory on the basis of global standards of control and exchange or unearthing the lost opportunities of the past to recover a sense of historicity as contingency and a historical agency for the people.24 In the present project, however, I argue that the national territory emerges along a planetary urban space in the tension between a grid-line system and a point-line system, abiding respectively by a logic of commodity exchange and a logic of military circulation. The modern map potentially allows for the capture of the urban planetary and the containment of the global logic of exchange into a national territory sutured by the ideology of the domus. This was the initial aim of the Express Survey Maps: to redefine an urban territory in terms of a national landscape where movement would be grounded in a military logic of circulation. And at the same time the map allows for figuring the

44  v  Chapter 1

encounter with the urban planetary, particularly in the mode of cartographic writing adopted by Ōgai. The question of the relation of the map with the national territory becomes crucial here and is problematized in terms of place experience, foregrounding the tension of the modern map between the image and the diagram and more specifically between the pictorial and the graphic registers. The Express Survey Maps were the result of a preliminary mapping process (genzu) and were to become the originals for subsequent reproductions on a large scale. They were realized by means of a French-style mapmaking technique developed by the painter and cartographer Kawakami Tōgai (1828–1881)25 and characterized by the use of multiple colors and the inclusion of local views called shizu (view). Born in the region of Shinano, in today’s prefecture of Nagano, Kawakami worked as a Shogunal official in the Institute for the Investigation of Barbarian Books (Bansho shirabesho) and studied Western painting, in particular watercolor painting. After the collapse of the Bakufu, Kawakami worked in the Kaisei Gakkō,26 where he taught painting and opened his own school frequented by future renowned painters such as Goseda Yoshimatsu (1855–1915) and Koyama Seitarō (1857–1916). In 1872, he started working as a mapmaking instructor in the army and completed in 1873 Map Coloring (Chizu saishiki), an innovative compilation of cartographic techniques, which became the standard reference for mapmaking and in particular for the Express Survey Maps. Kawakami Tōgai stressed in his writings and teaching the practical necessity in mapmaking of introducing pictorial elements, for example, colors and figurative depictions of major landmarks. This emphasized the materiality of the map, its dual nature as both analogical image and diagram. Those pictorial elements were first distinguished by the use of colors, relying on a multicolor printing technology that was still new and relatively costly. Cost in money and labor led, in conjunction with the geopolitical shift in Europe after the French 1870 defeat by the Prussians, to the abandonment of color printing in succeeding cartographic endeavors by official state institutions, in favor of a “German-style” unicolor, black-andwhite style. This was as much a question of speed as of cost: what mattered was the production of reliable modern maps for military circulation in the national territory. The national territory appears here as essentially military in its orientation, aiming at the reduction of movement to the imperative of a modern nation-state defined by the controlled circulation of goods, people, and affects and their localization in a bounded national space. In the Express Survey Maps, the tension between the image and the diagram is problematized in terms of the two graphic registers of the modern map (the

Encounters with the Planetary   v  45

grid-line system of coordinates and the point-line system of circulation and exchange) and actualized in a pictorial form, the depiction of a local place structured around a landmark, what Kamikawa called shizu. The pictorial image is localized in the margin of the graphic text, outside of the frame, and could appear to be simply representational and ornamental. However, in a manual of mapmaking published in 1880, the Handbook for Military Surveys (Heiyō sokuryō kiten), Kamikawa Tōgai justified the depiction of views of notable places such as temples and shrines, Buddhist statues, towers, pillars, individual trees, houses, and bridges, by their practical use in achieving the goals of the army.27 Those local views had a practical value that is more than simple ornamentation, if we limit our understanding of the ornament to the idea of being purely decorative.28 In the shizu, places of interest emerge at the crossroad of the transport system, mostly composed of roads and canals (the point-line system), and the grid of coordinates. Place emerges at the intersection of those two systems as a landscape structured around a local landmark that articulates the relation between the map and the territory in terms of orientation and movement in a military space of circulation. This sense of place is different from the Early Modern famous places (meisho) which, though grounded in a tradition of intertextuality (the literary world of poems) and also, from the Edo era, in empirical knowledge of a physical place, were defined in relation to neither an integrated national territory nor a global space of exchange. As I explain in chapter 2 on Tayama Katai, Early Modern meisho were primarily places to visit and look from, opening a space of practice, whereas modern places are structured around a landmark that turns the regular (any-place-whatever) into the exceptional, a singular place of experience.29 In Kamikawa’s cartography, the functional value of the local view is premised on a modern sense of place, emerging from this perspectival movement between the two graphic registers of the modern map (the grid-line system of coordinates and the point-line system of circulation and exchange) and opening onto a national space of circulation. Commodity circulation is constrained by the national as it emerges as a militarized space. What we end up with is an order of place that is essentially mobile. Place becomes a space of transit, a landscape oriented by a landmark that allows for passing not only inside a national territory but also between heterogeneous mappings of space: it is essentially perspectival and, although here attached to a military logic of circulation in a bounded national territory, always leaks into a global and emerging planetary space. The modern map is perspectival and as such homogeneity might not be what is really at stake. For it is not a simple collection of disparate fragments sharing the same homogeneous ground and united by a hierarchical structure dominated by the state. Rather,

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it articulates a space of movement between two (and potentially a multiplicity of) total and open perspectives, the point-line system and the grid of coordinates: the modern is constitutively hybrid. It is their inscription inside a national space of circulation that reduces these places to a flat functional ground, thus dissolving their distinct temporalities in favor of the modern linear time of a strategical space. The shizu present place in such a hybrid form, before their erasure from the national map. As these images show, various techniques are used to structure those views with a claim to realism (figure 1.3), at time using modern linear perspective (figure 1.4). In content as well, there is an indiscriminate juxtaposition of modern and traditional landmarks, from modern bridges to Buddhist pagodas. The Express Survey Maps still bear in the local views of landmarks the trace of their hybrid process of production, of their heterogeneous origins. Eventually, the shizu disappeared, seemingly confirming Michel de Certeau’s teleological reading of the history of modern cartography as excluding the narrative of the tour, the narrative of travel, from the diagrammatic space of the map: The map thus collates on the same plane heterogeneous places, some received from a tradition and others produced by observation [as with the early-modern meisho]. But the important thing here is the erasure of the itineraries which, presupposing the first category of places and conditioning the second, makes it possible to move from one to the other. The map, a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a “state” of geographical knowledge, pushes away into its prehistory or into its posterity, as if into the wings, the operations of which it is the result or the necessary condition. It remains alone on the stage. The tour describers have disappeared.30

The modern map would then function as pure ideology, erasing its process of production to present a totalizing, immobile, and eternal image, a diagram of places. However, the itinerary, the experience of travel, is not so much erased as it is refigured into a landscape of movement. The shizu opens a line of flight into an urban space exceeding any national boundary and never entirely captured in a global space of exchange. In other words, the national grid of coordinates never completely contains the deterritorializing movement of the point-line system of circulation and exchange, leaving room for figuring an emergent urban planetary. In fact, it is precisely the tension between the grid-point and the point-line systems that allows cartographic writing to figure the everyday encounter with the urban planetary. The leap in place actualized in the shizu, and Ōgai’s own map of Tokyo, always already exceeds its capture and containment and opens onto other urban dwelling experiences.

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Figure 1.3  Express Survey Map—Shizu: View of a Grave and a Shrine (Musashino-ku). Geospatial Authority of Japan.

Deconstructing the Baedeker Subject The 1910s were a transitional moment between the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) eras, before the post-1923 expansion of mass culture and after the nationalist boom of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904–1905.31 Henry Smith argues that the growth of Tokyo is clearly visible after the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese war and manifests itself as a shift from Tokyo as the showcase

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Figure 1.4  Express Survey Map—Shizu: View in Perspective of a Farmhouse in Ichigao (Yokohama). Geospatial Authority of Japan.

of Meiji civilization for the West and Japan to Tokyo as a problem.32 The Taishō emphasis on culture in opposition to Meiji civilization manifests a change from Tokyo viewed as an object to its being an everyday space of practice, an open environment in constant expansion, always leaking away from the state and capital. The urban becomes a space without exteriority and only retrospectively articulates the anxieties of the young Jun’ichi in terms

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of a movement of bodies and texts between the country and the city. This is why, rather than seeing Tokyo as a problem, I argue for the need to start from the situation of disorientation that allows for this cartographic encounter with the urban planetary in Tokyo. The first narrative moment of Youth stages the everyday encounter with the urban planetary as a new situation, a disorienting encounter with a radical space of alterity, undermining the very possibility for a sovereign subject of action. This implies in writing a subversion of the national subject of Baedeker cartography. Karl Baedeker, born in 1801 in a middle-class bourgeois family, was a traveler and a collector.33 In 1839 he published what is today considered to be the first guidebook in the Baedeker line, a third revision of a guidebook initially published in 1832 and already revised once in 1835, insisting in the preface that all information rested “exclusively on personal information.”34 The practice of tourism initiated by the Baedeker empire relied on an intimate relation between the individual tourist and Karl Baedeker the travelercollector; one revisits the presented sites to collect memories of places, reliving in an individual narrative of travel the abstract information contained in the guidebook. The little red book (all Baedeker guidebooks were immediately recognizable by their red cover) equally stressed the objective quality of its information and a subjective sense of taste, the personal appreciation of places by its writer-traveler. Rudy Koshar links this aesthetic appreciation of places to the constitution of a culture of leisure for an emerging bourgeois middle class: “tourism, in its Baedeker variety, presented a model of proper consumption that mediated between excess and grudging parsimoniousness, between conspicuous display and suffocating stinginess.”35 Culture as Bildung, individual cultural development, would be the goal, not pleasure and consumption. Baedeker’s’ ideal tourist embraced the values of a patriarchal bourgeois national culture (self-control, asceticism, discipline) structured by modern modes of transportation. As stated in the preface to the 1900 Baedeker guidebook, Paris and Environs with Routes From London to Paris, The chief object of the Handbook for Paris [. . .] is to render the traveler as nearly as possible independent of the services of guides, commissioners, and innkeepers, and to enable him to employ his time and his money to the best advantage.36

The guidebook “promoted freedom and self-reliance, direction and focus,”37 for a Bildung form of travel (Bildungsreise). For our discussion, it is important to stress two key elements of the Baedeker guidebooks. First, when participating in the constitution of a German national space defined as a unique culture, the Baedeker guidebooks were (largely for economic

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reasons, specifically the small size of the leisure market in Germany) international from the beginning. As such, they capitalized on the emergence of the urban planetary by articulating a tension—between national culture as Bildung and urban culture as leisure and consumption—in terms of a sovereign male subject. This tension between two understandings of culture is essential to our discussion of urban subjectivity, for Baedeker advocates the idea of a sovereign subject who, despite his mistrust of a modern culture of consumption, is not at odds with the emerging neoliberal consumer and the imperialism of the time. The Baedeker subject marked a historical moment at which the global movement of capital and the national territory38 capitalized on the new possibilities of subjectivation opened by everyday encounters with urban space. However, as Ōgai relocalized the Baedeker map in an East Asian place, he avoided conflating these two understandings of culture as national culture and urban culture. For his cartographic writing kept open the two layers of the grid of coordinates and the point-line system and in this process displaced the bourgeois subject onto a zone of irritability, both distant and close, a zone of friction expressed particularly in the details of the everyday cartographies, such as the shizu discussed earlier. Ōgai’s cartographic writing is an elaborate process of fictionalization similar to Bergson’s Neoplatonician work of problematization. In cartographic writing, the author-cartographer first acts as “a skillful cook who carves the animal without breaking its bones, by following the articulation marked out by nature.”39 This entails a careful work of delineation of spatial layers from the illusionary continuity of everyday life posited by abstract space (homogenous, fragmented, and hierarchized) in order to engage with the continuum of urban space. As Ōson “writes novels and plays the way a surveyor measures land with a rod and tape,” so too Ōgai’s cartographic writing functions by exteriorizing and carefully distinguishing the hegemonic layers of the urban map to open a planetary cartography of movement in modern Tokyo. This explains why D. Cuong O’Neill argues for a reconsideration of Ōgai’s descriptive writing in Youth “as a highly specific form of representation that attends to the changing experience of modern city life and the new and varied forms of temporal disorders inhabiting that life.”40 As O’Neill argues, “this language that describes the details of urban space not only explores how these details may be mobilized to support the particular development of a fictional character but also reveals in what more general relations this particularity may be located.”41 These “details” constitute the materiality of urban experiences and are defined in the novel by the movement between serial encounters with women, commodity circulation in a national market, and Jun’ichi’s

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childhood memories attached to his dead mother. Details reinscribe the urban subject inside a planetary space of experiences without exterior, something already central to Ōgai’s early travel diaries. Kamei Hideo famously argued that Ōgai’s travel narratives already “use the spectacle before the eye as a means for objectifying that which constrains the self, the limits of the self.”42 This process of objectification of sociohistorical structures at work in Ōgai’s writing grounds the mode of subjectivation characteristic of the urban bystander. For this very reason, if we are to make sense of Ōgai’s cartographic writing, it is important to distance ourselves from Kamei’s phenomenological reduction, in its attempt to sketch a subjective horizon of experience. For Youth is not about the discovery of a modern interiority, as in the confessional mode of naturalist writing, but rather about experimenting with a writing form appropriate to engage with and figure the everyday encounter with the urban planetary. This is why I adopted a speculative approach in this project, the only appropriate to a proper material engagement with the urban planetary. If gendered masculine, the bystander is a pathic subject who, in his explorations of Tokyo, learns that writing is a retelling before being the expression of a sovereign author. In O’Neill’s modernist reading of Youth, urban experiences in the end only allow for the ironic detachment of an urban subject grounded in an experience of loss and alienation. I argue, however, that the radical disorientation experienced by Jun’ichi displaces this alienated experience onto a narrative of encounters with the urban. The idea of urban modernity as grounded in an experience of disorientation is central to modern Japanese studies, and for the most part the argument circulates around the idea of the lost home, albeit with significant differences depending on the historical time and place considered.43 In the ideology of the modern Japanese state, the longing for the hometown located in the provinces, the furusato Jun’ichi longs for by the end of the novel, is conflated with the desire for the Japanese nation as a lost space of authenticity and belonging, the motherland endangered by Western modernization. This ideology of the lost home embodied by the Japanese furusato constitutes one answer to this experience of disorientation, an attempt to capture and arrest the movement of encounter with the urban planetary in a fantasy of national domesticity, the domus. As Marilyn Ivy explains, “since the majority of Japanese until the post-war period had rural roots, furusato strongly connoted the rural countryside while the urban landscape implied its loss.”44 This is however only one side of Japanese modernity, one with devastating effects because of its complicity with a homosocial and imperialist narrative of national development. Cartographic writing does not reject this narrative but rather

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plays on the tension between the everyday exposure to the urban planetary and an ideology of the national grounded into a lost place of origin, in Youth thematized in terms of a detachment from the maternal space of domesticity. This is why Jun’ichi’s relation to women is ambiguous at best, irritating, flirting with a fantasy of mastery and the anxiety of losing control, as with Mrs. Sakai from whom he has in the end to escape. Jun’ichi is irritated by women until he rejects the bourgeois subject’s longing for the maternal space of origins. This pathic subjectivity thus becomes a generative answer to what some have called the feminization of urban space, moving away from the fear of castration in order to experiment with other modes of writing, in particular cartographic writing as dwelling practice. In this respect, Youth shares concerns similar to Kon Wajirō’s modernology, including the orientation toward a world of objects in use. Keeping these considerations in mind, I want to go back once more to the opening lines of Youth. “Koizumi Jun’ichi left his inn on Shiba-Hikage. Despite the map of Tokyo he had with him, he kept bothering people about directions.”45 This scene of disorientation at first appears to express the aporetic relation between the map and the territory in modernity. It seems that Jun’ichi needs the confirmation of passersby to find his way even though the map he holds already gives all the necessary information—that is, despite or precisely because of the representational logic of the modern map which posits a separation between the subject of knowledge surveying the map and the subject of action moving in the city. We would then find here an exemplary case of split modern subjectivity if it were not for the fictional nature of this cartographic space. Jun’ichi comes from the provinces, it is his first time in Tokyo, and yet he easily figures out how to use the Tōkyō Hōganzu and to speak Tokyo language (Tōkyō kotoba), as if he already knows this urban language as soon as he steps in. As Aoyama argues, Jun’ichi’s encounter with urban space is highly mediated, first by Ōgai’s map and then by the Tokyo dialect he learned from reading fiction. When he arrives at Mr. Ōnishi’s house, Jun’ichi is surprisingly pleased to be able to answer to the maid: “Having just arrived from the country, Jun’ichi replied in the Tokyo accent [Tōkyō kotoba] he had picked up in reading a novel. He had uttered each word with deliberate care as if reciting an unfamiliar foreign language. That he was able to come out with an acceptable response pleased him.”46 Tōkyō kotoba however is as much an accent as a dialect in the process of becoming standard Japanese, manifesting the mediating position of Tokyo then as regional dialect (Tōkyō hōgen) and national language (hyōjungo).47 In other words, it is geographical and linguistic mediation that articulates

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the encounter with the urban planetary within Tokyo. Urban dwelling is then not a question of articulating a functional representation of an empirical reality, nor of a progressive learning of urban social codes and modes of expression. It consists rather in learning how to navigate an everyday space of experiences that can only be encountered all at once as a totalizing fiction.

Cartographic Fictions Dancing Girl’s Toyotarō could only write his story on a boat after abandoning his German lover Elise and remained caught in the aporia of the modern bourgeois subject. Jun’ichi, however, learns to navigate this modern urban space thanks to the letters he regularly receives from his grandmother and comes to understand how to write by retelling an old legend he heard from her in his childhood. The novel ends with Jun’ichi leaving the inn where he stayed in Hakone, leaving behind the femme fatale Mrs. Sakai and the little maids he encountered, to start writing Tokyo through the gaze of its used objects. Contrary to Katai (chapter 2), urban dwelling in Youth is not defined by the meeting and parting of individual subjects but by the circulation of objects and their presentation as a historical spectacle of movement to the urban bystander. Youth’s Tokyo is a world of objects, although it already moves away from the spectacle of commodities found in works analyzed by Maeda Ai such as New Tales of Tokyo Prosperity (1974). There we find “people who consume things as symbols of enlightenment and people who gaze on the new sights of Tokyo, so that the mode of interaction is rather between people and things.”48 This spectacle of commodities is ordered by the train station in a national space of exchange and circulation. And as I show in conclusion, the narrative of Youth moves us from the train station to the storehouse of used objects. The urban planetary thus emerges in Youth as a cartographic fiction, an open totality ordered by the map of Tokyo. In Ōgai’s cartographic writing, the relation between Jun’ichi and Tokyo, the author and the narrator, the reader and the urban text is articulated as a perspectival movement between two cartographic layers, the grid and the point-line system, respectively, indexed on commodity exchange and military circulation in a national territory. This is the second moment of cartographic writing, the identification of differences in kind, presenting urban space in the language of two totalizing and exclusive worlds. In this way, the initial disorientation experienced by Jun’ichi is provisionally resolved by reinscribing urban space in a national landscape of movement structured by the transport system. The suspension of

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the Bildung narrative generates in turn a second experience of disorientation that completes the detachment of the urban subject from the maternal space of domesticity. Unable to start writing, Jun’ichi then learn to experience Tokyo in a series of encounters with modern women. Ōgai’s map, the Tōkyō Hōganzu, was undoubtedly a radical innovation. Chiba Shunji and others have remarked on how the Tōkyō Hōganzu is the first example of a tourist map of Tokyo based on modern cartographic conventions of precision and accuracy, such as the ones found in the Baedeker guidebooks.49 Chiba argues that, unlike premodern maps such as the late Edo kiriezu, modern maps are based on the abstraction of the subject from their immediate surroundings and bodily perceptions in order to structure, plan, and control the movement of individual bodies in urban space. We find the same argument in Nagai Kafū’s collection of urban essays Hiyorigeta (1914–1915),50 where the narrator opposes the expressive quality of late Edo kiriezu51 to modern official maps of the capital, which reduce urban space to the order of the state. As I explain in chapter 3, however, Kafū is no simple nostalgic subject: refusing both Edo kiriezu and modern maps, he ends up choosing early Meiji maps, which display a more subtle and generative play between the mapping and cartographic impulses. The problem with this kind of critique of modern maps and cartography in general is that it relies on a reductive understanding of modern urban experiences as the alienation of bodily perceptions caused by a homogenizing and totalizing instrumental reason. This is also the problem with Henri Lefebvre’s critique of modern everyday life as the production of abstract space by the everyday colonization of the lived space of representations by representations of space, a critique that is always endangered by a nostalgic desire for a lost space of lived experiences.52 Conventional readings of Ōgai’s early works such as the 1890 novella Dancing Girl have the same problem. In this novel, another alter ego of Ōgai, Ōta Toyotarō, experiences for the first time the antinomy of the modern subject split between the sovereign transcendental self and the subjected empirical self. As Tomiko Yoda shows, however, we should not end our reading with the alienated bourgeois subject, nor start from the putative weakness of the modern male subject in the face of the West and woman.53 As Yoda explains, the antinomy of the modern subject leads in the end from the hero asking “Who am I?” to the question of “Who is writing?”—that is, the relation between the subject of enunciation and the enunciated subject of the national state. And indeed, Youth is from the start about writing, about who or rather from where one writes in a planetary situation, where the desire to “write like a god” can only end in disorientation and despair. That is, unless one understands that writing in a

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planetary situation is always a retelling, that it relies “not in communicating what one has seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to you.”54 Youth is then not about the movement from country to city but really about modern urban experiences. The transport system is the backbone of urban space, and as one steps into the transportation network, one is always already in urban space, moved by this continuous space of flows, lost amidst urban stimuli of all sorts. The map of Tokyo is here a heterogeneous space, structured by two hegemonic layers, a grid-point and a point-line system, respectively, aligned with the international space of nation-states and the national space of circulation and exchange. On the one hand, the streetcar network traced in vivid red lines and dots structures movement in the central area of Tokyo, following the modern imperatives of speed and efficiency in a capitalist economic system. “Streetcar Tokyo” is the name given by Henry D. Smith to the capital in the aftermath of the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War. The streetcar, first developed in Tokyo in 1903, is emblematic of the new order of urban space as a space of exchange and labor, of amazement and anxiety in face of rapid change, as well as contestation and resistance to economic changes.55 However, this political dimension of the streetcar system is not readily apparent in Youth. Here, the transport system is reduced to its utilitarian function, a means for moving from point A to point B, the movement between these being canceled out in the smooth passing of the car. Following the indications of the map, Jun’ichi thus reaches almost effortlessly the pension where lives Ōishi Kentarō, who is unable to meet him. On the other hand, a grid is superimposed on the flat homogeneous plane to allow for the localization of places listed in the booklet sold together with the map: cartographic space is indefinitely fragmented into a multiplicity of geographical locations. The use of the grid to refer to guidebook entries further intensifies the tension between the hegemonic layers of the map and the nature of place. The grid is not here the international system of coordinates already in use in Japan. Using the Japanese vernacular system of referencing called i-ro-ha, it functions as an intermediate, operational layering transversal to the politico-economic imperialist order of a world of nationstates (figure 1.1). The grid is local, Japanese, and universal, an abstract layer that polarizes the map around a partial series of discrete landmarks, partial because the list does not pretend to be closed or exclusive but rather acts to punctuate an open field of everyday experiences. The map of Tokyo is not a representation of the various possibilities of subjective location in a

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homogeneous space, nor is it the impossible god’s-eye view of an external subject transcending the multiplicity of urban everyday experiences. In the Tōkyō Hōganzu, the urban is experienced as a fiction, that is, a space of practice that does not preexist the definition of the two totalizing mappings of the grid-point and the point-line systems. As the deterritorializing potential of the system of exchange is neutralized, the historicity of urban space as a pure space of movement is suspended and bound to a national territory oriented by a narrative of progress. This everyday experience, however, resists the developmental model promoted by the Meiji government, as expressed in the narration by the impossibility for Jun’ichi to start writing and retrospectively organize his urban experiences in the form of a linear narrative. The formal separation between the systems as two totalizing and exclusive structures can then allow for both the exploration of urban space and a second experience of disorientation. This second disorientation expresses the anxiety of the male bourgeois subject, as Jun’ichi comes to experience Tokyo as a feminine territory. In the last part of the novel, Jun’ichi, now more in tune with the rhythms of urban space, has become used to navigate the various spatiotemporal layers of Tokyo, its spaces of work, leisure, and domesticity, each associated with a female figure. Urban experiences are in Youth, as in Ōgai’s two other major novels, Dancing Girl (1890) and Wild Geese (1915), structured around female characters. Jun’ichi’s experience of disorientation is now portrayed as an encounter with a multilayered feminine territory, and his urban explorations become a serial narrative of encounters with modern women, crystallizing particularly around two figures: the young maiden Oyuki and the middle-class housewife, the deceiving seductress Mrs. Sakai. In Wild Geese, published two years later, the young Otama fuses these two figures of the modern woman in the persona of a moneylender’s mistress. Otama is trapped in her house and can only watch and wait from her window. The modernist view from the window that defines the alienated urban experience from Baudelaire to Henri Lefebvre56 becomes in Ōgai’s cartographic writing the perspective of the modern woman, and it is the male bystander, circulated across those layers and subjected to the trapped female gaze, that comes to embody the new urban subjectivity. This is still a male bourgeois subject but one that cannot be appropriately accounted for by resorting to the figure of the modernist alienated subject, the emasculated Japanese male national. Never occupying the liminal position of a sovereign subject suspended between the domestic space of the home and the public space of the street, nor ever becoming an urban flâneur, this urban subject is an irritated and irritating bystander in transit.

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From the Station to the Storehouse For the urban bystander, urban navigation is a matter of affective circulation and not a cognitive learning. It consists in the opening of an affective sphere of intimacy in an urban space inhabited by a multiplicity of female gazes. In the third moment of cartographic writing, the “apprehension of real time,” urban experiences are not defined any longer in terms of an alienation from the maternal space of origins (the domus) opposed to a feminine urban territory but rather by the irritation occasioned by the everyday local friction between layers of the Tokyo map. This irritation is neutralized for a time by the movement of letters Jun’ichi receives regularly from his grandmother, preparing the encounter with the storehouse of used objects that collapses Tokyo and the hometown into a spectacle of everyday things. Cartographic writing then becomes a dwelling practice where the scene of writing, the maternal and national place of origin, has been displaced onto a planetary urban space defined by a multiplicity of origins and writing itself onto a secondary retelling. The identification of differences in kind allowed by a double experience of disorientation now opens the possibility of access to a symbolic meaning (shōchōteki igi) hidden “behind ordinary daily life,”57 a symbolic meaning that would hold together the various threads of the everyday.58 As such, the deconstruction of the narrative of the Bildungsroman seems to lead to a conclusion similar to Franco Moretti’s thesis. For Moretti, the Bildungsroman is not primarily concerned with the individual development of a bourgeois male protagonist but rather with making sense of youth as the “‘symbolic’ form of modernity,” that is, of its specific temporality and materiality. Moretti defines youth as “the new epoch’s ‘specific material sign’”: “Youth is, so to speak, modernity’s ‘essence,’ the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past.”59 And in order to become a stable form encapsulating the disorienting movement of modern urban experiences, youth would require a necessary end. On the contrary, I argue that Ōgai’s cartographic writing avoids the closure of the urban subject characteristic of hermeneutics, whether practiced in the guise of Franco Moretti, Kamei Hideo, or, as I discuss below, Jacques Rancière. If youth is indeed the “‘symbolic’ form of modernity,” it is rather as what Gilles Deleuze calls a “cosmic force” that, in the rotating movement of a series of images, constitutes the everyday local threshold of a planetary urban subjectivity.60 For Jun’ichi, the everyday appears to reside in the collection of “commonplace, even banal, aspects of our ordinary life.”61 These objects devoid of any exchange or use value fascinate the young man who develops

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the habit of passing in front of an antique shop and gazing through its windows. As O’Neill remarks, “these ruined objects serve as a kind of memory trace that does not simply obey the temporality of ‘progress.’”62 They are devoid of any function and abstracted from the two layers of the urban map, suspended in an intermediary place, in transit, with no other value but the everyday spectacle of urban life they present to the eyes of Jun’ichi. We could in that way understand the narrative movement of Youth as moving from the train station to the storehouse of used objects, the latter associated with another shop he used to like as a child: “Jun’ichi’s interest in this antique shop contained a trace of his former feelings for that old storehouse. It was a sort of investigation. From a rusty iron kettle to a restored dish, he could imagine the history of these various artifacts.”63 Yet a shift has occurred. Those memories of the lost home64 are now external to the subject who, rather than being the modern subject replaying those memories in the intimacy of the private room, is now a bystander. The urban subject now has a direct access to the historical life of those commonplace artifacts by virtue of the localization of the storehouse at the intersection of the space of commodity exchange and national circulation. The storehouse is abstracted from its spatial and temporal surroundings. “Passing in front of the store and looking in, Jun’ichi felt this shop was the only one that had not undergone any kind of influence from its environment.”65 The storehouse presents a different form of historicity in tension with the pure space of exchange of the station: it suspends and abstracts the historical movement of goods and people and opens a hole in the grid of circulation of urban space. Urban movement is not arrested but suspended, and it is the accumulation of used objects in the storehouse that generates a historical image of movement. In fact, more than everyday objects themselves, it is the place through which they circulate and are gathered together that matters. The art historian Will Straw defines urban movement as a singular temporality, in the tension between mobility and stasis, construction and decay, accumulation and sedimentation.66 Following this understanding of urban temporality, the narrative function of the storehouse of used objects does not rely so much on the discrete historicity of place as on the planetary temporality of a dwelling place localized at the intersection of a multiplicity of origins. The storehouse opens a direct link with an image of the past: the old storehouse he used to visit as a child, where, losing sense of time, he would be scolded by his mother, now deceased. The storehouse figures the temporality of the urban planetary as a multiplicity of origins. And rather than the death of the father, it is grounded in the memory of the dead mother,

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the impossible unique origin of meaning and value now displaced onto a series of encounters with places, women, and objects. This is why Jun’ichi cannot ever find a time to start writing, creating fiction “like a god,”67 because to start means to occupy an originary position of mastery from which to survey and map a narrative of progress. In that respect, Youth’s storehouse does not function as the aesthetic unconscious described by Jacques Rancière in the case of modern European literature. Taking the example of the antiquary store at the beginning of Balzac’s The Wild Ass’ Skin, Rancière argues that one paradigmatic orientation of modern literature takes the approach of the writer as archeologist.68 For the modern writer, “everything speaks,” and these insignificant ruins of consumption reveal the disease of the century, the irrational drive of a will to success and totalization that forecloses the possibility of a unitary meaning. Certainly, both storehouses do share the same sense of “aesthetic democracy,” of a potential for writing different from the hierarchized rhetorics of representational writing. Yet for Rancière, this is premised on a hermeneutical practice that would give access to the unconscious world of passions. Ōgai’s cartographic writing, however, aims at staging in a local and open image the everyday urban spectacle of a planetary movement in order to define a dwelling form that allows one, however briefly, to rest and heal. The storehouse of used objects is this precarious shelter where the irritation of distance and friction occasioned by cartographic writing articulates the shift from a determinative condition, the urban as a problem to be solved, to a planetary situation oriented by a series of constraints. The question “from where to write” has been answered by the end of the novel: from the gaze of used objects, the irritated/irritating feminine gazes looking back at Jun’ichi, the failed writer. “The visit to the storehouse arouses Jun’ichi’s imagination, returning him to the task of writing,”69 because it reminds him of an old story from his grandmother. Through the letters Jun’ichi receives periodically from his grandmother, he discovers the fantasy of the lost home of Japan, the furusato where “time” “passed as methodically and uneventfully as ever,”70 in opposition to his own urban temporality characterized by continuous fluctuations of speed. Yet the furusato does not here constitute an external space of origin that grounds the identity of the urban subject, nor is it opposed as country to the space of the city. It functions rather as a polarity of the urban cartography that makes visible the everyday rhythms of urban life itself. It is the regular arrival of letters that orders the temporality of the urban everyday, regrounding a heterogeneous temporality onto a linear and serial sense of

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time allowing for the everyday navigation between urban worlds. In other words, the letters of the grandmother come from a relative outside to urban space that externalizes the immanent, mechanical temporality of both the national territory and the global space of circulation, linear and cyclical, the repetition of “the ever-same in the ever-new.”71 And this opens onto another possibility of writing. Cartographic writing is performed as a retelling, never the controlled creation of an empowered masculine subject. It consists in a process of externalization of urban layers, of different urban temporalities, in the narrative mode of retelling proper to planetary urban experiences. Youth starts by retelling the encounter of Jun’ichi with his new urban persona, a bystander, in the movement from the country to the city, entering Tokyo at the Shinjuku train station. By the end of the novel, this movement has been repeated and displaced. Jun’ichi this time is moved from the station in Hakone where he severed his affective ties with Mrs. Sakai to Tokyo and the storehouse of objects. In that respect, when in the last lines of the novel the old lady owning the pension bows to Jun’ichi, we should not see there the recognition of a completed maturation but the final rupture with any sense of a unitary identity and grounded origin. Neither traveler nor collector, and both at the same time, the urban dweller is a bystander, but one always suspended in transit, caught between the station and the storehouse of objects, between movement and the spectacle of movement, in the spacing that opens the subject to its planetary urban movements. In Youth, Ōgai thus redefines the modern urban condition as a question of localization inside an everyday spectacle of movement by playing with the hegemonic layers of the map of Tokyo, the immanent space of commodity exchange and the transcendental space of the nation, to open a planetary space of encounter with multiple beings and worlds. Cartographic writing thus presents strong affinities with Simondon’s methodology of analysis that similarly plays with established oppositions between subject and object, immanence and transcendence, to uncover the originary relation constitutive of beings and worlds.72 This relation is in the end nothing else but love, a planetary movement that displaces the desire for a romantic liaison (in the sense of a juridical binding) to suture the lack of the modern subject, onto love as transformational relation. Displacing the aporia of modern subjectivity defined by the alienated and emasculated masculine subject, Ōgai opens a possibility of accessing the urban planetary in a pathic subjectivity, experienced through the gaze of used objects, through the window of the storehouse. The urban can now become a planetary cartography of love, where love

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is not denied anymore but opened to other encounters, transformed and transformational. However stranded, Ōgai kept gesturing toward this possibility of love.

Notes 1. Youth (Seinen) was originally serialized in the journal Subaru from March 1910 to August 1911. I have relied for all quotes in this article on Shoichi Ono and Sanford Goldstein’s translation with a few minor modifications when judged necessary: Mori Ōgai, Youth, trans. Shoichi Ono and Sanford Goldstein, in Youth and Other Stories, trans. and ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 371–517. 2. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 421. 3. Richard Bowring, Mori Ōgai and the Modernization of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 141–142. 4. Tomoko Aoyama, “Seinen: Ogai’s’ Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist,” Japanese Studies 14, no. 3 (1994): 66–77. 5. D. Cuong O’Neill, “Portrait of an Artist in Tokyo Circa 1910: Mori Ōgai’s Seinen,” Japan Forum 18, no. 3 (2006): 310. 6. I follow here Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of the Bergsonian method. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (1966), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 4. 7. Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1980), trans. Brett de Bary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 8. Thomas LaMarre reads Ōgai’s scientific and literary work on the basis of Bruno Latour’s provocative conceptualization of modernity, where he argues that the work of purification advocated by modernist national strategies consists of fictions always already supplemented by the material proliferation of hybrids. Thomas LaMarre, “Bacterial Culture and Linguistic Colonies: Mori Rintarō’s Experiments with History, Science and Language,” Positions 6, no. 3 (1998): 597–632. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991), trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 9. Mori Rintarō, Tōkyō Hōganzu (Tokyo: Shun’yōdō, 1909). 10. I borrow the term “Greater Taishō” from Sharon Minichiello’s edited volume, Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy 1900–1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1998), to designate the first thirty years of the twentieth century in Japan. 11. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 383. 12. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 486. 13. Sian Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 175. 14. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 477.

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15. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 478. 16. According to D. Cuong O’Neill, the character of Ōishi Kentarō is modeled on the naturalist writer Masamune Hakuchō (1879–1962): O’Neill, “Portrait of an Artist in Tokyo,” 299. 17. In English, see Earl H. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji Japanese Thought (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981). In Japanese, Mita Munesuke’s lectures on modern Japan present an excellent overview of the ideology of risshin shusse. Mita Munesuke, “Risshin shusse-shugi Kōzō: Nihon Kindaka no ‘Seishin,’” in Teihon Mita Munesuke Chosakushū Dai III Maki. Kindai Nihon no Seishin Kōzō (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2010), 180–221. 18. Kevin Doak’s work examines Japanese nationalism by opposing Ethnic Nationalism, in particular the Japanese Romantic School, to State Nationalism, in an attempt to redeem a sense of the nation against the oppressive rationality of the state. The argument I am trying to articulate here is that both forms of nationalism rely on a conception of the national subject rooted in a sense of place that resists the new experiences generated by a global urban space. Kevin Doak, “Ethnic Nationalism and Romanticism in Early Twentieth Century Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 22, no. 1 (1996): 77–103. 19. The Express Survey Maps are available online at https://kochizu​.gsi​.go​.jp​/ france​-saisyokuzu. Inō Tadakata (1745–1918) is considered as the father of modern Japanese cartography for having started a general survey of the Japanese coastline completed after his death by his surveying team in 1921. The Total Map of the Coastline of Great Japan [Dai nihon enkai yochi zenzu] shows the entire country in 8 maps of 1:216 000, 214 maps of selected areas at 1:36000, and 3 more detailed maps at 1:432000. Oda Takeo, “Inō Tadakata no jissoku nihonzu no kansei,” in Chizu no rekishi: Nihon-hen [The history of maps: Japan volume] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1974), 102–114. Watanabe Ichirō, Inō Tadataka sokuryōtai [Inō Tadakata’s survey team] (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2003). 20. The sole consistent history of modern survey and cartography in Japan is the volume published by the Nihon Sokuryō Kyōkai, Chizu sokuryō hyakunenshi [One hundred years of mapmaking and survey] (Tokyo: Nihon Sokuryō Kyōkai, 1970). On the particular case of the Express Survey Maps, see Nagaoka Masatoshi, “Meiji zenki no tegaki saishiki Kantō jissokuzu: Dai ichi gunkan chihō niman bun ichi jissokusokuzu genzu kaidai” [Early Meiji hand-made survey-based colored maps of the Kantō: Bibliographical references on the 20000:1 preliminary express survey maps of the first military regional division], Kokudo chiriin johō 74 (1991): 22–32. 21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 173. 22. Nihon Sokuryō Kyōkai, Chizu sokuryō hyakunenshi [One hundred years of mapmaking and survey] (Tokyo: Nihon Sokuryō Kyōkai, 1970), 41. 23. Yamane Nobuhiro’s work analyzes the relation between the development of modern transport and communication system, on the one hand, and modern cartographic practices, on the other, as a key factor in the integration of the national territory. He shows

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as well how this is realized in constant interaction with the development of urban space in a continuous dialectic of the domestic and the colonial territory. Yamane Nobuhiro, “Extending Telecommunication on a Nation-Wide Network and the Modernity of Civil Engineering in the Meiji: Accumulation of Survey Maps and Total Capture of ‘National Land/Nation-State,’” Japan Journal for Science, Technology & Society 7 (1998): 59–85. Yamane Nobuhiro, “Technological Innovations of Transportation and the Extension of the Postal Network in the Early Meiji Period: The case study of RyūkyūOkinawa” (unpublished paper for the 18th IAHA Conference, 2004). 24. The first approach is favored by the second wave of modernization theory, rooted in a critique of the national in reaction to the first wave of cold war modernization theories, which they rejected for their unacknowledged political agenda in looking for the emergence in Japanese history of a modern subjectivity supportive of American geopolitical interests in East Asia. For a critique of modernization theory, see John W. Dower’s introduction to Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman (Pantheon, 1976), 3–108. The second approach is that of People’s History (Minshūshi), as championed by Irokawa Daikichi and Yasumaru Yoshio. For a mapping of People’s History, see Carol Gluck, “The People in History: Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography,” The Journal of Asian Studies 38, no. 1 (1978): 25–50. See also Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period (1969), translated by Marius B. Jansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Yasumaru Yoshio, Nihon kindaika to minshū shisō [The modernization of Japan and popular thought] (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1974); Yasumaru Yoshi, “Hōhō” to shite no shishōshi [Intellectual history as method] (Tokyo: Azekura Shobō, 1995). 25. Tsukahara Akira, “Tōgai to chizu: Kawakami Tōgai to Iwahashi Noriaki” [Modern aesthetics and maps: Kawakami Tōgai and Iwahashi Noriaki], Kōbe Shiritsu Hakubutsukan Kenkyū Kiyō 17 (2001): 5–43. 26. The Kaisei Academy was created out of the Bakufu Banshoshirabesho, later to constitute in 1877 with the Western Medical Institute (igakkō) the Tokyo Imperial University. See James Mitchell Hommes, “The Bansho Shirabesho: A Transitional Institution in Bakumatsu Japan” (MA thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2004). 27. Tsukahara Akira, “Tōgai to chizu,” 25. 28. The last chapter of the present book, focusing on Kon Wajirō’s 1929 New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo, works through this concept of the ornament in terms of dwelling, utility, and pleasure, precisely to challenge this reductive understanding of the ornament. 29. I build here on Brian Massumi’s essay on topological navigation, “Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic,” in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 177–207. 30. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 121. 31. Asada Akira, Hasumi Shigehiko, Mitake Masashi, and Noguchi Takehiko, Kindai Nihon no Hihyō 3: Meiji Taishō-hen, ed. Karatan Kōjin (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1998). Katō Norihiro, Nihon Fūkeiron (Gunshō, 1989; reis. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2000).

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32. Henry D. Smith, “Tokyo as an Idea: An Exploration of Japanese Urban Thought until 1945,” Journal of Japanese Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 57. 33. I rely here on Rudy Koshar’s’ work: Koshar, German Travel Culture (Oxford and New York: Borg, 2000). 34. Koshar, German Travel Culture, 23. 35. Koshar, German Travel Culture, 38. Koshar remarks that while tourism was becoming increasingly popular among women, and in particular young American women attracted to old Europe and its romantic gentlemen, Baedeker guidebooks remained attached to a patriarchal bourgeois culture in which travel was understood as a form of intellectual labor that should not be subsumed by the logic of consumption to which women supposedly abandon themselves willingly. For a discussion of American women tourists in literature, see Matsukawa Yuko, “The Cartography of Expatriation: Mapping the American Girl Abroad in Fiction 1874–1915” (PhD diss., Brown University, 1995). 36. Karl Baedeker, Paris and Environs with Routes from London to Paris: Handbook for Travellers, by Karl Baedeker with 12 Maps and 36 Plans, 14th ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1900), v. 37. Baedeker, Paris and Environs, 28. 38. I borrow this distinction from Giovanni Arrigui’s definition of modernity by the historical opposition of a territorial logic of the state and a capitalist logic. David Harvey has recently proposed to use this conceptual distinction to make sense of contemporary US imperialism. Giovanni Arrigui, The Long Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1994). David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 39. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1911), 156. 40. O’Neill, “Portrait of an Artist in Tokyo,” 295. I refer to O’Neill’s work to more clearly distinguish my own approach from the modernist strand of analysis and criticism dominant in modern Japanese studies. 41. O’Neill, “Portrait of an Artist in Tokyo,” 311. 42. Kamei Hideo, Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature (1983), ed. Michael Bourdaghs (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, 2002), 264. 43. Marilyn Ivy in particular understands Japanese modernity in terms of the lost home, borrowing the expression from Kobayashi Hideo: Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995). See Kobayashi Hideo, “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933), in Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo Literary Criticism 1924–39, ed. and trans. Paul Anderer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 46–54. 44. Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 104. 45. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 381. 46. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 381. 47. I develop this point in chapter 3, on Nagai Kafu, in reference to the Japanese literary scholar Isoda Kōichi.

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48. Maeda Ai, “The Panorama of Enlightenment,” trans. Henry D. Smith, in Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, ed. Jim Fujii (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 83. 49. Chiba Shunji, “Muenzaka no onna: Mori Ōgai Gan to chimei kigen setsuwa,” Journal of Yamanashi Eiwa Junior College 23 (1989): 12–20. 50. Nagai Kafū, “Hiyorigeta,” in Kafū Zuihisshū Jō (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1986), 32. 51. Edokirizu or Edokiriezu are the last incarnation of Edo commercial maps. Tawara Motoaki, Edo no chizuyasan: Hanbai kyōsō no butaiura (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2003). 52. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991). Lefebvre does not call for a return to a premodern time but rather attempts to recover possibilities at the very heart of modern times. 53. Tomiko Yoda, “First-Person Narration and Citizen-Subject: The Modernity of Ōgai’s ‘The Dancing Girl,’” The Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 2 (May 2006): 278. 54. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 76. 55. Socialism is in its early days closely linked with the question of urban life, and in particular the transport system, as shown by the active participation of the newborn socialist party in the 1906 protests against the raise in train ticket prices. Ishizuka Hiromichi and Narita Ryūichi, Tōkyō-to no hyakunen (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1986), 91. 56. The view from the window constitutes the primary location of the modern subject in a number of analyses of modern urban space. I refer in particular to both Henri Lefebvre’s last work Rhythmanalysis and Maeda Ai’s reading of Mori Ōgai’s’ Dancing Girl. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (1992), trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). Maeda Ai, “Berlin 1888: Mori Ōgai’s’ ‘Dancing Girl’ (1982),” trans. Leslie Pincus, in Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, ed. Jim Fujii (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 295–328. 57. Koshar, German Travel Culture, 480. 58. The term igi implies a sense of materiality and ethics stronger than the more common term used for meaning, imi. 59. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World (London: Verso, 1987), 5. 60. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (1993), trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (New York and London: Verso, 1998), 48. 61. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 481. 62. O’Neill, “Portrait of an Artist in Tokyo,” 310. 63. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 487. 64. As Stephen Tanaka shows, the child is in Meiji Japan integrated into a national narrative of development and progress, although remaining a source of possibilities for new urban subjectivities. Stephen Tanaka, “Childhood: Naturalization of

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Development into a Japanese Space,” in Cultures of Scholarship, ed. S. C. Humphreys (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 21–56. 65. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 487. 66. In a recent article by art historian Will Straw, on which I draw in many parts of this article, urban movement is defined as a unique temporality, in tension between mobility and stasis, construction and decay, accumulation and sedimentation. Following this understanding of urban movement, it may be not so much the discrete historicity of place that the total image reveals, as the temporality of a global urban singularity. Will Straw, “The Spectacle of Waste,” in Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture, ed. Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw (Montreal and Kingston: McGill University Press, 2010), 193–213. 67. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 421. 68. Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious (2001), trans. Debra Keates and James Swenson (Cambridge: Policy Press, 2009), 34. Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s’ Skin (1831), trans. Herbert J. Hunt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). 69. O’Neill, “Portrait of an Artist in Tokyo,” 300. 70. Mori Ōgai, Youth, 495. 71. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 128. 72. Muriel Combes, Gibert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 19–20.

CHAPTER 2

v

The View from the Near-Suburb Tayama Katai’s Musashino

As it stands, will everything fall apart? Tokyo starts its walk at a dark and heavy pace. As if following the name of Edo in its grave, warriors abandon the capital and return to the country. Even those who stay line down swords, armors and helmets engraved with their family crest and sell their name. Fujimori Terunobu, Meiji Tokyo urban planning (1990) As for the city, it relates at least as much to travel as to dwelling. The latter might equally be rural. But the city becomes a station and a sojourn for the one who does not dwell in place, for the traveler. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Trafic / Déclic” (2004)

In August 1869, the first governor of Tokyo, Ōki Takatō (1832–1899), launched the “Policy of Mulberry Trees,” an ambitious project that transformed an important part of the bushi (warrior) lands of the Yamanote area into mulberry fields. For the urban historian and architect Fujimori Terunobu, this return of Yamanote to Musashino marked the beginning of modern urban planning in Japan.1 In total 1,106,770 tsubo of bushi lands (roughly 400 square kilometers) were appropriated by the Meiji government to finance the development of the new capital and the country. The origins of modern urban planning in Tokyo consist in an operation of landscaping, the making of an economic garden after the destruction and leveling down of the space of the bushi where power and wealth had accumulated over 300 years.2 As Yamanote returned to Musashino, the Tokyo near-suburb became the degree zero of an emerging planetary urban space for a population of dwellers in transit. In this chapter, I discuss Tayama Katai’s travelogue

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writings and reconsider the relation between landscapism, urbanization, and urban dwelling experiences in terms of the view from the near-suburb. In the short essay quoted as an epigraph, Jean-Luc Nancy suggested that urban dwelling experiences are better defined in relation to the traveler, the one who does not stay, implying that urban dwelling forms have more in common with a station than a fixed home.3 In the case of Tokyo, indeed, modern urban space emerges from the ungrounding of the proper place of feudal domesticity—although one that under the system of alternate residence (sankin kōtai) was already split between the province and the center, as it is turned into an economic garden for the circulation of goods, people, and things. This implies as well, as Raymond Williams argued for the case of England, that the opposition between the city and the country is a nostalgic illusion retrospectively projected onto the present to make sense of and ward off the anxieties generated by the displacements caused by urbanization and an emerging planetary situation.4 Nostalgia is a way to engage with these anxieties by delaying the future, the everyday encounter with a planetary situation that is then captured and redefined as a deterministic condition. But the urban traveler does not so much delay the future as suspends in a landscape a movement of planetary urbanization in order to explore other ways of dwelling and of narrating these dwelling experiences. Drawing on both Japanese and Euro-American debates on urban space and landscape theory, I analyze in this chapter Tayama Katai’s 1920 travelogue and geographical essay, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo (Tōkyō no kinkō).5 Building on these discussions and more recent interventions in Japanese literary and urban studies, I argue for a more generative reading of Katai’s travelogues by displacing the question of individual subjectivity onto the one of place experience, in particular landscapism. As for Ōgai, Kafū, and Kon, it is for Katai a matter of exploring how landscapism can “generate form and how we inhabit form,” for urbanization is always about both form and deformation.6 The Near-Suburb of Tokyo is a hybrid text, representative of Katai’s writings in the genre of kikōbun (travelogue), a mix of travel diary, guidebook, and fiction for future travelers in the area, in conitnuity with other travelogues published at Hakubunkan where he had previously worked from 1899 to 1912. Katai celebrates a modern and urban landscape emerging from the encounter of the land and the road in the Tokyo near-suburbs. Here, the urban dweller is a traveler finding a temporary abode in the old road stations of Musashino as they are being replaced by the new train stations. However, the old road station (juku) is not a place of nostalgia: it expresses the melancholic experience of transit characteristic of an uneven landscape of movement.

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Sian Ngai argues that in modernity, anxiety as “nervous agitation” comes to replace melancholia, which was indexed on a premodern time and a feeling of despair.7 This understanding of melancholia appears from Kierkegaard and Heidegger to Freud in particular with his classical opposition of a pathological melancholia to the work of mourning. Whereas Freudian melancholia would be about refusing to let go of the lost object and would align with the feminine, modern anxiety would become characteristic of the male bourgeois subject. Yet this bourgeois subject is always defined by a state of alienation and the nostalgic desire for the lost home rather than a successful work of mourning, unless this is to be a never-ending process as in the psychoanalytical cure. For Katai and others, however, melancholia becomes an affect that does allow one to learn how to dwell, not just in loss but also in the uneven movement of people, goods, and things. Melancholia if always in tension with the bourgeois nostalgia for the lost national home does not entirely erase the everyday lives of urban dwellers and the never-ending work of care that allows for repair in writing.8 Katai’s urban traveler is a melancholic subject learning to dwell in transit in a planetary situation marked by unevenness. For Katai’s travelogues exemplify the “social and temporal unevenness”9 taken for granted by writers of the then periphery, where pasts comingle in a present in search of a future. For melancholy is ultimately about change, about learning to dwell in change if we understand change as “a loss that cannot be mourned.” It is a negative attachment and thus an ugly feeling, albeit one with its own positivities. As Elizabeth Povinelli explains in the case of Australian indigenous cultures, the melancholic is “an obligation to an unknown, unknowable object.”10 The melancholic view from the nearsuburb thus allows Katai to write another narrative of urban modernity, one that is not about rupture and lingering feudal remnants but rather about the contemporaneity of multiple temporalities and spatial practices when confronting an imperative, new, and unknown situation emerging anytime anywhere: the urban planetary.

The View from the Near-Suburb The premise of this chapter is that the near-suburb, rather than being an in-between or liminal space between urban center and suburban periphery, constitutes a degree zero of the urban planetary, a space of movement in continuity with itself and without exterior, defined by the passing of travelers across stations, by arrivals and departures that intensify and thereby give shape and color to local dwelling experiences. The near-suburb is defined by an ongoing movement of emergence and disappearance of places

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of experience: old road stations replaced by new train stations, burning passions too soon extinguished, arrivals and departures. I thus start from the distinction, or rather tension, between the urban as near-suburb and the urban as center, the latter defined by a saturation of stimuli. This implies different inflections of the dialectic of centrality that defines urban dwelling experiences: concentration and expansion in the near-suburb, implosionexplosion in the urban center, both within the same continuous and uneven field of movement. The view from the near-suburb found in Tayama Katai’s travelogues allows for approaching this new planetary situation by means of a centrifugal movement into the banality of local travel experiences. For the urban planetary is as much in urban centers as in its peripheries and beyond. Katai precisely hovers between both, between the modern new and the nostalgic past: he dwells melancholically. Katai’s landscapism does not work on a center-periphery model. Edward Seidensticker has described the historical development of Tokyo during the Meiji and Taisho eras as the rise of Yamanote, the High City of land, in opposition to the plebeian Low City of waters, Shitamachi.11 In this chapter and the following one on Nagai Kafū’s Fair-weather Clogs, I argue that a binary model of center and periphery does not allow us to properly address modern urban dwelling experiences in a planetary situation. In his writings on the near-suburb, Katai shows how in the course of modern processes of urbanization, Yamanote is displaced and relocalized inside the Musashino plain and how Musashino is urbanized in a process of Yamanote-ification (Yamanote-ka).12 Yamanote, as Shitamachi, is both an internal periphery and a peripheral centrality, which means that urban dwelling is always a question of perspectivalism—that is, of movement and situation, of flows and leakages—rather than of a binary opposition between two spaces. I focus in this chapter on land transportation in the Tokyo near-suburb to argue that modern transport systems have not so much flattened out place experiences as opened an uneven territory to its planetary urban situation. And at the same time, Katai’s landscapism always attempts to reground this emerging space of movement onto a national human geography that is Japanese and civilized. This melancholic landscapism engages safely and efficiently with a new urban reality, although it does end up arresting the movement of the urban planetary and reinscribing it within a national space. In “The Suburb as Colonial Space in Modern Japanese Literature and Cinema,”13 Inoue Kota reopened the debate on modern Japanese urban space by way of a detour through Edward Said. Focusing on the suburb as liminal space, Kota argued that the modern relation between the city and the country should be understood as a relation of colonization of the latter by the former,

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the suburb occupying a mediating position.14 This allowed him to consider the relation between the city and the country as not only a simple division of functions but also a process of colonization, one analogous to and coincidental with imperialism itself. The suburb, rather than the country, becomes for Inoue “the site that articulates colonial relations”15 in specific cultural forms, particularly literature and cinema. The suburb was then for Inoue not so much a self-enclosed suburban utopia—the most representative example being the financier Shibusawa Eiichi’s residential area of Den’enchōfu, modeled on Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City—as an intermediate, marginal, and in-between space of hybridization between the two polarities of the city and the country.16 Inoue’s work opened interesting avenues for thinking the relation between the modern nation-state, capitalism, imperialism, and urbanization: not only did it allow us to go beyond the Jamesonian argument of the national allegory,17 but it redefined colonization as a formal process internal to the dynamic of modern urban space. Hence Inoue’s preference for the term kōgai (suburb) as more inclusive than kinkō (near-suburb), which “usually connotes only the area close to the city.”18 However, the idea of the suburb as an intermediary space of hybridization still relies on a necessary distinction and separation from the space of the city proper, reproducing the ideological opposition of city and country. The term near-suburb is used here as an analytical concept, in order to understand this new urban space inaugurated in Yamanote by the mulberry policy and then extended into Musashino by the railway. It is important, however, to distinguish between the near-suburb (kinkō)/city center binary and the suburb (kōgai)/city center one. Maeda Ai explains the difference between suburb and city center in terms of a relation to otherness: According to Roland Barthes, among the signs that demarcate the city center from the peripheries are those that signify otherness and, conversely, those that point toward individual identity. The center is the site of meetings with strangers, a space where exchanges between self and other are constantly acted out through the ludic power with which it is suffused. Non-central locales [kōgai] are by definition the preserve of all that does not partake of interaction with others: one’s own family, one’s home, one’s individual identity.19

Maeda opposed the urban center (toshin) to its periphery—the suburb and near-suburb (kōgai designates both in his case)—in terms of (1) a quality of place, defined by the opposition of the open urban space of encounter with others and the closed domestic space of the home, and (2) a geographical location, that is, urban core and peripheral suburb. Yet as I have argued, this center-periphery model is too limiting to understand the nature of urban

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experiences, in particular in the near-suburb. For the near-suburb is not the space of the domus (the nostalgia for the lost home found in the suburb as it becomes the idealized space of bourgeois domesticity), nor of direct and anonymous interactions with strangers. And nor is it exactly about a desire for otherness, for here the urban, however planetary, is a Japanese space. Tayama Katai is conventionally understood as a literary figure central to the emergence of a confessional writing style, the I-novel (shishōsetu), a Japanese form of naturalism generally defined by, first, a turn toward the inner self and individual passions and, in addition, identification of the author with the novel’s main character. This is how Kobayashi Hideo criticizes the I-novel in his influential essay “Discourse on Fiction of the Self” (Watakushi shōsetsu ron), where he opposes two confessional modes, a European socialized mode and a lower Japanese one where the turn to the inner self is diagnosed as marking both a disengagement from the social and an uncritical embrace of an imported writing technique focusing on everyday life.20 As James Dorsey explains: Kobayashi criticizes famed naturalist Tayama Katai (1872–1930) for forgoing the tortuous process whereby his idol Maupassant forged his literary vision and instead simply adopted the end product, the technique (gihō) fashioned to accommodate that vision. This technique was one whereby the writer turned his or her eyes from the stars (abstractions and ideals) to the ground beneath their feet (sordid realities). In short Katai (and the naturalists who followed) developed a “tunnel vision” focused on the qualities of everyday life without engaging the larger intellectual context (the philosophy of positivism) that had prompted that approach. For this reason, Japan’s naturalist writers, Kobayashi argues, had been unable to forge the type of “socialized self” (shakai-teki shita watashi) that made European writing so vibrant.21

This “tunnel vision” developed by Katai and his successors is condemned by Kobayashi for its aestheticism, in the sense of a separation from the social context of emergence of literary forms and the reduction of the self to the almost mechanical effect of a writing technique. Fundamentally, he condemns Katai for being unable to address the larger picture of a socialized self and for hallucinating an everyday defined by fetishism of the West— albeit Katai’s own West. Katai recreated himself in a fictional world where, as Indra Levy argues, he indulged in his desire for the literary products of European modernism crystallizing in the figure of the femme fatale.22 Katai’s aestheticism is on this view defined in terms of technique, artificiality, and separation from the social and individual agency, as his self becomes emblematic of the modern alienated self, doubly alienated from the social by an uncritical acceptance of the Western world of literary fiction.

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Reading Katai’s travelogues along with his theory of travelogue and fiction writing, however, shows that this condemnation of Katai by Kobayashi and others is reductive and in fact not so much about Katai as about the hegemonic form taken later by the I-novel. In Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity, Tomi Suzuki argues that the I-novel does not constitute a literary genre as such and should rather be understood as “a historically constructed dominant reading and interpretative paradigm.”23 Suzuki’s critique stresses two points: first, the I-novel’s turn away from the social context determining its writing form opened a different aesthetic form of readership and literary interpretation; and second, the identification of the author with his characters, though an authoritative fiction of voyeuristic readers that was encouraged by the mercantile strategy of episodic publication in newspapers and literary journals, was never so simply claimed by Katai himself. Indra Levy also argues that Katai’s theory of naturalist writing as “raw description” (rokotsu naru byōsha) is “not only a critique of a certain approach to writing in the name of a better realism but an implicit attack on ways of reading as well. At the heart of Katai’s polemic against literary artifice lays an unremitting moral judgement against those writers who failed to be moved by the content of Western literature—or more precisely, its depth of meaning.”24 Suzuki’s and Levy’s interventions thus productively displace the question of representation of the self and interiority onto that of writing, reading, and spectatorship. For Katai, it is the very use of technique and artificiality, divorced from an embodied and local reading experience, that is, the problem with Japanese modern literature. Matthew Fraleigh gives us a good starting point for further opening up this question of urban subjectivity, dwelling, and spectatorship in Katai’s work.25 For Fraleigh, it is not so much the mechanical recording of facts as the “recreation” (saigen) of an observational experience that is at stake in order to attain a “subjectivity that lacks subjectivism,” a perspective akin to a “subjectivity of nature.” Travelogue writing for Katai consists in a mix of descriptions, both objective and lyrical, and dialogues. Fraleigh suggests that rather than the confessional mode and its unitary subject, we should pay more attention to the relation between the mode of realism, the everyday historical experience of place, and the social space opened in a writing mode akin to a process of landscaping. Nature does exist, but it is human and historical, setting the stage for urban dwelling experiences. Katai’s near-suburban landscapes are ordered by the passing of the railway, a network of transport and exchange for both war and commerce that displaces the premodern road network. As with Nagai Kafū, discussed in the

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following chapter, place experience is not limited to a catalogue of famous places (meisho), indexed on an imperial semiotic and its companion calendar, but available anytime anywhere to the one passing through the near-suburb. This is not national landscapism, although the national remains the ground of identity, still caught for Katai between European civilization and Asian barbarism. Katai thus enables me to open and work on a gesture toward the urban planetary in its moment of emergence in the near-suburb when it had not been entirely captured by the reactive formations of bourgeois domesticity. His urban dweller is a middle-class bourgeois free to move between places— as such a typical imperialist subject as Mary Louise Pratt argues—and also an anonymous traveler learning to dwell in transit between urban stations. In Planetary Longings, Pratt calls for the need to decolonize mobility, which means first to “disrupt the equation of mobility with freedom” that is all too often an unacknowledged premise of travel literature analysis.26 As she rightly argues, travel experience takes place at the contact zone between traveler and host and is too often recounted at the expanse of local dwellers and places. If the irruption of the urban planetary is characterized by an intensification of place experiences and resonances across and beyond the planet, it then is all the more necessary to engage with indigenous experience. For mobility is also forced, and the right to stay is as important as the right to move. Pratt’s intervention is important, but also too polarizing, simply reversing and reducing the kind of argument made by Nancy, de Certeau, and others about urban dwelling as dwelling in transit—which is not the same as stressing physical mobility as such. As we see in Katai’s text, urban dwelling is not a choice between staying or leaving, moving or not moving, but a matter of learning to dwell in transit, where our dwelling places have become temporary stations. The station is therefore both an accumulator of past experiences and an incubator of planetary experiences in their own right.

The Scene of Musashino The place where I now live is known as Yoyogino, in the Edo Meisho Zue, Yoyogi Village. In other words, it is the area that runs between the hills from Sendagaya toward Komaba, and then from the Kōshū Kaidō toward Takaido. (Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 27)

The Near-Suburb of Tokyo and other contemporary guides to the Tokyo nearsuburb marked a shift in the history of guidebooks of Tokyo, from eventcentered tourist guides to ones more focused on everyday life and urban pleasures.27 Since the first days of the modern capital in the 1870s, numerous

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guidebooks have been produced, targeting people coming to the city for either the short or the long term. In the first case, the national expositions provided the main incentive,28 while in the latter, the motive for moving to Tokyo could be based on educational or professional opportunities. The Meiji national industrial expositions (naikoku kangyō hakurankai) were held five times during the Meiji era (1877, 1881, 1890, 1895, and 1903). Modeled on world expositions such as the 1873 Vienna International Exposition, they played a key role in the production of a national space of commodity circulation. Scholars have often emphasized their role in the education of a national citizenry by naturalizing a series of modern categories of identity and practices of visual consumerism and by privatizing the mode of public display in the transition from expositions to exhibition halls (kankōba) and department stores.29 However, at the turn of the century, guidebooks started to celebrate the pleasures of nature in the Tokyo near-suburb, for not only tourists but also increasingly for urbanites tired of life in the city.30 The NearSuburb of Tokyo is representative of this trend supported by the urbanization of Musashino and the development of garden towns along with the rise of a new middle class of salarymen.31 The Near-Suburb of Tokyo starts as a geographical essay dividing Musashino into four areas: hills in the west, fields in the north, rivers in the east, sea in the south. The text itself is composed of two parts—“Tokyo and the near-suburb” and “The periphery of Tokyo.” I focus here on the first part, Tokyo as near-suburb, defined by the human geography of the Musashino plain, its localization in the national railway network, and the aesthetic appreciation of local places by the urban traveler. The near-suburb is opposed to the periphery by its quality of unevenness, in particular its mix of temporalities. Yet although Katai defines it in terms of physical distance to the center, we should also understand the near-suburb as a form, that is, as another layer of the urban planetary, one that can be found equally in the urban center and, as in the early text on old stations discussed later, in the mountains of Nagano. “Tokyo and the near-suburb” is composed of eight chapters: “The scene of Musashino” (Musashino no haikei), “Tokyo of the past” (Kako no Tōkyō), “The taste for woods and the beauty of riverside areas” (Hayashi no shumi to suigō no bi), “The old stations of the suburb” (Kōgai no koeki), and then the four near-suburbs of Tokyo, “The western near-suburb of hills” (Oka no saikō), “The northern near-suburb of fields” (Ta no hokkō), “The eastern near-suburb of rivers” (Kawa no tōkō), and “The southern near-suburb of the sea” (Umi no nankō). More so than the popular Thirty Years in Tokyo (Tōkyō no sanjūnen),32 this text wholeheartedly embraces the changes

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brought by modern urbanization and in particular by the development of the railway system. Modern Tokyo is presented as more convenient to its inhabitants, a clear improvement in that sense over the muddy 1880s city of Katai’s youth. In the opening page of The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, the near-suburb is defined on the basis of three locations: Katai’s home in Yoyogi, the location of this place in the Edo Meisho Zue read by Katai when he was younger,33 and the geographical space of Musashino. We see here how the conjunction and convergence of three modes of localization—home, history, and geography— defines a dwelling place, the narrator’s place of enunciation; this is also the origin of the travel of the reader, both imaginary and actual, as Katai intended his travelogues to be read on-site: his intended audience is the urban traveler, dwelling in transit, rather than the Edoite traveling at home while reading catalogues of famous places. Dwelling places of the near-suburb emerge in a perspectival movement between three urban cartographies, a movement that articulates human geography as an assemblage—here the plain of Musashino. The title of the first chapter, “The scene of Musashino” (Musashino no haikei), implies an operation of landscaping starting with the setting of a scene in a three-layered process of localization. After living for about twenty years in the Komagome neighborhood of Yamanote, Katai moved to Yoyogi in 1906, at a time when this area was only starting to be urbanized for the needs of the new middle class. Katai describes this process of urbanization as an organic movement: the “force of expansion of the urban relentlessly eats away, deeper and deeper.”34 The urban is a force that is both combinatorial and disjunctive, that is, as Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue, “a combinatory force-field.”35 This movement of territorialization turns Musashino into Yamanote, a new frontier and open space of development. As Katai explains in Thirty Years in Tokyo, “The Yamanote is a giant whirlpool of lives led by men who have come from nowhere, lives fraught with unforeseeable difficulties but, surrounded by their cheerful wives and young families, full of great expectations for the future.”36 The Yamanote, opposed to the plebeian area of Shitamachi stuck with its traditional customs (until its destruction in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake), is the future, the new dwelling ground of an emerging middle class of anonymous urban dwellers. Once again, Musashino became a new frontier for the Japanese state, this time an urban one. This organic movement of expansion of the urban is presented in the next sentences as the opening of an everyday scene: the rows of zelkova trees (keyaki), identified later in the text as one of the distinguishing elements of Musashino’s western suburb, leave room for a new dwelling place, the

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everyday of an emergent middle class with its rows of elegant two-story houses enclosed in grand stone walls and “its beautiful high-collar housewives walking with their cute children.”37 Everyday life in the near-suburb is defined by modern-style housing and the modern family and most of all by the bustling activity of the Yoyogi train station, now ranked fifth or sixth in the whole of Japan according to Katai. The near-suburb designates both a transitory space and a national center: it is both center and periphery. This centrality of Yoyogi is then extended to the whole of the plain of Musashino in a famous lyrical passage: Musashino is for me a place I cannot forget. However way you think about it, it is truly a place of interest. When I think about the wind of Musashino, its rain, its snow, hills and rivers, it almost feels as if the grandeur of nature insinuates itself into my body. There is no other place in Japan with such an interesting history, such a changing topography and rich colors. Even Kyoto, Japan’s capital of old, does not surpass Musashino in taste.38

For Katai, echoing Kunikida Doppo, Musashino surpasses the old capital Kyoto, too marked by human artifices,39 by the width, diversity, and breath of its natural landscape unified by the towering figure of Mount Fuji. Musashino is defined by a double structure. We have first a natural topography, austere in its desolation and eternal in the face of human everyday lives, and then the transport system: roads, canals, and most importantly the railway. It is the combination of these two structures that composes a human geography as a national landscape from which can emerge a multiplicity of memory images, multiple scenes of the past, of tired travelers and wandering samurai returning from the battlefield. Roads in particular bear the traces of the past, as if walking the same roads trodden by past travelers would allow for Katai and us to reproduce and relive these past experiences. A sense of history emerges in an everyday experience of passing, in the continuous passing of urban dwellers across ages, travelers now sharing the same present in a synchronicity of uneven temporalities. There is here a claim for the possibility of sharing the same everyday experience of travel through Musashino, the same experience of place, thanks to the encounter of road and land and more generally of map and image. It is the transport network that allows for the emergence of a sense of the social defined by unevenness, movement, and change. This is why Goi Makoto is right to argue that the popularity of Meiji travelogues as both literary genre and product of consumption for urbanites cannot simply be understood by localizing them in a national tradition of travel writings going back to the Heian period.40 Meiji travelogues differ from their predecessors on two

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points. They imply a modern consciousness of space as visual landscape that displaces the premodern and early modern tradition of meisho. And, being closely related to the development of the transport system, in particular the railway, they allow for a new perception of space. There is in the kikōbun genre both a distantiation of the traveler from the places experienced and a sense of temporal difference, albeit one not based on otherness or uncanniness but on unevenness. They present an experience of transit, in space through a landscape and in time through memory images of famous places—the Edo Meisho Zue reinscribed onto an anonymous landscape. Most importantly, Katai’s travelogues are grounded in the everyday experience of railway travel. Analyses of Katai’s travelogues rely on two sets of questions. On the one hand, they examine the relation of Katai’s travelogues with his fiction writings as part of the naturalist movement. Kikōbun seem to abide by conventional understandings of the I-novel genre, a mode of writing wherein the narrative movement relies on the voyeuristic desire to conflate the author, the narrator, and the character of the text, sustaining a claim for realism. At the same time, travel narratives are more complex than they appear and often “played an important role as a testing ground for the exploration of the referential status of novelistic prose.”41 Katazyna Bartiszyńka’s work on Irish and Polish novels reads minor novelistic genres such as travel writings and gothic fictions, too often understood in terms of a situation of exception characteristic of the uneven temporalities of latecomers, as in fact central to the development of the modern novel. I make a similar claim here, by focusing on a canonical Japanese modern writer to argue that unevenness, however much intensified in East Asia, is not an exception but the defining feature of modern urban experiences. And with Katai, we have someone who wrote both travelogues and novels, both writing modes constantly reacting to one another in their exploration of “the referential status of novelistic prose.” In the introduction to another guide to the Tokyo near-suburb published in 1923, The Tokyo Near-Suburb: Day Trips, the narrator’s enunciative position is defined and legitimized by the geographical knowledge and actual frequentation of the places described in the guide prior to the writing: The author has as much as possible tried to make preliminary explorations [of the places described]. Geographical references are not foregrounded in the text, but if reading closely the reader will on their own realize that the book was indeed written with the intention to make those references clear. They would even more clearly absorb this geographical knowledge by keeping at their side a 5000:1 army map.42

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It is geography, and more specifically the kind of human geography generated by modern cartographic practices questioned by Ōgai and decried by Kafū, that grounds the position of enunciation of the narrator. Places are reinscribed within a national landscape of movement, structured by the passing of the train and thus accessible to anybody reading the guide with a map. If it is the representation of an observational experience that is at stake in Katai’s “travelogue-like sketching” (kikōfū sukecchi),43 his early fictions often borrowing the motif of the narrator-traveler recounting his experiences in various places, in travelogue writing in particular, this experience is first the result of a cartographic process, a perspectival movement between the train and the road, as one displaces the other. The position of enunciation emerges from a cartographic practice, a perspectivalism that is not grounded in an a priori individual subject. The author, the narrator, and the traveler cannot be conflated as a unitary transcendental self, nor can they be subsumed into the aporia of the modern narrator split between a subject of enunciation and the subject of the enunciated. For the subject of The Near-Suburb of Tokyo is, as Kobayashi Ichirō argues, the passing of time.44 The second set of questions raised by Katai’s travelogues concerns the popularity of this genre and in particular the interest and desire for spaces of otherness in Japan at the turn of the last century. Mochida Nobuko argues that travelogues’ success must be understood as part of the long-lasting popularity of modern kikōbun writings from at least the 1890s, reflecting an evolving imagination of spaces of otherness and of the boundaries of the Japanese.45 Narita Ryūichi defines the production of otherness in modern Japan as a three-layered process: the rejection of premodern barbaric (yaban) practices; an internalization of modern otherness (ankoku, the dark side of modernity, usually understood as the urban slum); and finally as an imperialist Japan localizing itself with respect to Western nation-states, the displacement of otherness outside of Japan, in the jungles of Africa, Asia, and Russia.46 Katai’s travelogues would correspond to Narita’s third stage. While he labels Chinese people as animals in diaries written during the Russo-Japanese War,47 he erases traces of a dark other of civilization within the Japan of his travelogues. The Near-Suburb of Tokyo is particularly devoid of such a sense of exteriority or even uncanniness within the Japanese territory. One point of contention with this argument would insist on the relation with the natural in other fictional works, such as “The end of Juemon,” where nature retains a sense of otherness and monstrous power. But in Katai’s travelogues, the narrator encounters a space already domesticated and socialized, turned into a national space of circulation. Their audience is an urban spectatorship for

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whom the whole national territory, now urbanized, has been made accessible by means of the railway system. In chapter 5, “The past of Tokyo,” Katai registers the decline of previously prosperous areas of Tokyo returning to a bleak state of nature, yet he does not criticize this loss. In fact, it is this movement of change, from prosperity to desolation, from life to death and then another life, that for him makes the greatness of Musashino.48 There is no sense of nostalgia for Edo, which he describes simply as “one sort of magnificent culture”49 that lasted for 300 years. If there is a sense of rupture, it is with the early days of Tokyo, when the new capital was covered in mud, darkness, and the low eaves of buildings: What I remember of the first days of Tokyo is a city of mud, a city of darkness, a city of dust storms, a city of councillors’ horse-driven carriages, of lined-up earth-walled houses with low eaves.50

Here, what is despicable for Katai is early Meiji Tokyo’s similarity with contemporary Asian and in particular Chinese urban spaces, barbaric spaces to the Western traveler: “There was nothing there, just like markets in today’s Chinese cities. Pierre Loti describes all this, and I think that to the eye of the Westerner, it [early-Meiji Tokyo] appeared in many ways similar to the barbarity of China.”51 In other words, the rupture is pronounced not with a lost national past but with a contemporary outside seen as, China. There is for this reason nothing wrong in modern Tokyo: “The look of today’s city has made it a most livable place for today’s people.”52 Tokyo now has light and modern means of transport. It is a bright city, a city of light. And yet, rather than the modern facades of Tokyo, it is the old road stations and their melancholic atmospheres that define for him urban dwelling experiences. Chapter 4, “Old stations of the suburb” (kōgai no koeki), prepares for this sense of modern historicity by offering a compelling image of dwelling in the Tokyo near-suburb: the old road station. As the narrator reminds us, in modern Tokyo the four peripheral road stations (shishuku) of Edo, Naitō-Shinjuku, Senju-juku, Itabashi-juku, and Shinagawa-juku, have been replaced by four central train stations, Tokyo Station, Ueno Station, Manseibashi Station, and Ryōgoku Station. In both Edo and Tokyo, the limits of urban space are defined by nodal points in a transport network, but in Tokyo, stations have been relocated from the periphery to the politico-economic center, a change that is manifested by the displacement of the centrality of the road by the railway. In other words, historicity in the near-suburb emerges from the structural unevenness of the transport network. This emergence of historicity through the movement of the train in Katai’s text is interesting because the

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modern transport network—in particular the railway—is usually defined in terms of homogeneity, functionality, and the logic of commodity circulation, in short, as abstract space. In other words, it would not allow for any sense of difference and thus of historicity. However, what makes the appreciation of old road stations a dwelling experience is precisely the transport network and the historical narrative it articulates. The railway passes through the landscape, and it is in this passage that an experience of place is made accessible to the reader. This could be the standard experience of travel of the modern tourist, if not for an association of the passing of the railway with the passing of time, and the localization of those local scenes in a local story of road and train stations. Stations are for Katai places of arrival and departure, and their practice is defined by an ethico-aesthetic attitude: “And the sadness of partings was also the pleasure of another encounter. Sadness of departure, joy of arrival; the heart of these people forever whirls in this vortex.”53 The definition of stations as urban places of transit, of departure and arrival, resonates with Lefebvre’s minimal definition of urban space as a place of meeting and gathering.54 The station is a maelstrom of affects passing through individual travelers. Kokoro, the affective movements of urban travelers, are detached from their individual body to reattach themselves to the station and accumulate there, continuously reenergized by the passing of other travelers. For the objective of writing is not to depict the emotional states of individuals but rather the natural rhythms that moves them, in short the affective atmospheres that move anonymous travelers. Photographs for Katai actualized in material form these invisible atmospheres (kūki).55 The station thus condenses experience and expression in the passing of the traveler through a landscape of movement. The near-suburb stations are points of contact, connection, and continuity (sesshokuten) between urban and natural spaces and as such are defined by a double impulse or intention of the heart (kokoro), toward the suburb, the quiet and dark location of the home to which one returns after a long day of work in the city, and the city, defined by the bright pleasures of nightlife. In other words, they point to a form of centrality that is neither the suburban home nor the urban center of nomadic consumerism, the two forms of centrality discussed by Barthes and Maeda. The near-suburb stations partake of a different mode of dwelling, emerging in the perspectival movement between two impulses. The station thus becomes a metonymic sign for the near-suburb. By extension, the near-suburb as uneven landscape of movement expresses the condition of living of all urbanites, caught in the double bind of a desire for the natural home (as opposed to urban work) and for the artificial lights of

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urban pleasures, between two forms of centrality that can never really allow one to dwell in transit. Katai describes here the contradictions of everyday life for the new middle class, mostly visible in the suburb but characteristic of any modern urban dweller, always in transit between temporary dwelling places. More importantly, he opens the possibility for a third space of dwelling experience, the anonymous space of the near-suburb and its old stations. What makes those places interesting is precisely their displacement by the new railway system. By virtue of this displacement, old stations become historical and social places, assuring a continuity between urban space and natural space—in his words, tokai and no, literally the city as open space of gathering and nature as open flat land. Old stations are anonymous meeting points, defined both by the ahistorical coordinates of the modern map and the uneven modern transport network. They become in Katai’s narrative a minimal dwelling form emerging from a desire for other forms of everydayness, that is, the historical difference that makes the station a dwelling place. In this respect, otherness does not refer to the uncivilized population of early Meiji Tokyo or its slums but to the historicality of place experiences in the near-suburb. Place experience for Katai is a matter of appreciation that is both visual and haptic. Its individual character, its “placeness,” is defined by both a singular interest (omomuki) and an atmosphere (kibun): interest is the tension that allows a place to sustain itself as everyday dwelling atmosphere for an urban traveler witnessing its everyday unfolding. In other words, the urban traveler is a witness who in witnessing intensifies the existence of places in the near-suburb and in this process institutes them as near-suburban dwelling places, as stations. In an earlier work published in 1908 in the literary journal Bunshō Sekai entitled “Old Stations,”56 Katai reflected on the passing of the premodern road station of Oiwake in the prefecture of Nagano and the melancholic feeling experienced there. Melancholia here is articulated by two terms, sekiryō and haimetsu. Sekiryō, meaning both loneliness and desolateness, is an affect that is both individual and spatial, because it is the affect of a place as it is experienced by an urban traveler. Haimetsu in turn is a historical event, the passing of local places, crushed by the uneven movement of history, yet still lingering. These two terms define the aesthetic beauty of the landscape of the Oiwake road station and the old road station in general, a modern sensibility for which the landscape is visual. Visuality here is as much scopic as it is haptic: it sees, touches, and is moved because it is the result of human activity and of the passing of time experienced by the urban traveler and in turn the reader of the story.

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For this reason, interest and atmosphere are not the property of the urban dweller passing through those places. They are autonomous vectors of affectivity that attach themselves temporarily to a place, composing a deserted and temporary shelter. The railway system, oriented toward the production of a homogeneous space of circulation, is a system of points and lines, of continuous departures and arrivals, that structures this movement of affects. And despite this drive toward totalization, homogenization, and closure, it cannot completely repress its own historicity, its being a historical apparatus that always encroaches on a preexisting reality. By shifting the attention of the reader to the old station, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo makes visible the historical and uneven movement of the railway. For there is a built-in unevenness of the railway as it detaches, displaces, and reassembles interests and atmospheres of places, in space and in time. Unevenness is a temporal quality of place allowing for a perception and appreciation of the movement of planetary urbanization, in and as near-suburb, in the old station.

Urban Landscapism As Kristin Ross argues in the case of nineteenth-century France, landscapism is not simply an aesthetic practice detached from the reality of everyday experiences and politics but always implies a relation to the social: “Landscapism was not to be confined to a purely aesthetic debate; a veritable science of landscapism, the science of objective space par excellence, university geography, took form during the era of the Parnassians.”57 And this historical relation to the social is first concerned with dwelling experiences and the composition of a dwelling form appropriate to an urban landscape of movement. The kind of landscapism discussed in this chapter is thus not limited to national landscapism, first concerned with identifying a national essence in a landscape abstracted from history and the everyday lives of its human and nonhuman dwellers. Katai’s landscapes, however national, were historical and socialized and thus at odds with the kind of national landscapism promoted by the likes of Shiga Shigetaka, always abstracted from the time and everyday lives of its population. Shiga is considered one of the first advocates of kokusui-shugi (cultural essentialism), and his landmark study of Japanese landscapes, On Japanese Landscapes (Nihon fūkeiron, 1894), is a typical example of what Satō Kenji calls “landscape nationalism.”58 Shiga was a pioneering nationalist geographer, his studies of Japanese landscapes focusing particularly on Japanese mountains and thus exemplifying the emergence of a modern sense of space dominated by visuality, scientific geography, and the naturalization

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of national aesthetics at the expense of everyday lives. Topography replaces people.59 Unlike Shiga’s mountains, Katai’s near-suburbs constitute an urban layer copresent with and yet distinct from Tokyo as it was designed as the “nation’s symbolic and ritual center.”60 Shiga relied on classical texts to write his On Japanese Landscapes, in particular defining classical landscapes in relation to an imperial grammar of poetic references, the premodern famous places (meisho). Katai’s landscapes, however, are experienced in place. His theory of naturalism as the “recreation” (saigen) of an observational experience directly relates to his theory of travelogue writing, which stresses a necessary tension between geography and poetic writing, tension from which human geography emerges as a historical assemblage.61 This tension is necessary to allow for an experience of place to happen and a dwelling form to emerge. This is why Katai’s descriptions are not neutral, objective descriptions (byōsha) but accounts (kijutsu), preferably told in the first person through a fictional persona while drawing on his own travel experiences in Japan.62 This also relates to his own use of photography in his travelogues as I show in the last part of this chapter. For example, in the chapter on the Western suburb of hills, Katai recounts a day trip to see cherry blossoms in the Koganei area he did with his older brother when he was seventeen or eighteen years old. There was no train yet, so they had to leave before dawn and on the way learned an interesting lesson: We left the inn in the Ushigome Tomihisa neighborhood [in today’s Shinjuku Ward] just before dawn. And interestingly, we learned that at this season the waters flowing from Koganei into Tsunohazu Shinmachi [east of today’s Shinjuku station] will, depending on whether they carry flower petals or not, tell us better than newspapers whether the cherry blossom season is early or late. An old lady living nearby told us, “Flowers are not yet flowing down so you’re fine.”63

The style combines geographical descriptions with literary references brought together by dialogue in direct speech. In other words, it is direct speech that articulates description as fiction and allows for the recreation of an observational experience. As I show in the conclusion, this process is intensified by the insertion of photographs, whose indexical nature grants a sense of legitimacy and truthfulness to the account. The landscape of movement that emerges from this combination of account, direct speech, and photographs is uneven, melancholic, and always leaks into other places and media texts. Katai’s recalling of a trip made during his youth in 1888–1889 resonates with Doppo’s Musashino published ten years later in 1898. This scene in particular refers directly to the famous Cherry Bridge episode

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discussed later, emblematic of a new sense of landscape as anonymous landscape accessible anytime anywhere to urban travelers. Karatani Kōjin’s classic essay “The Discovery of Landscape” haunts any discussion of the modern imagination of Japanese urban modernity in Japanese and English scholarship.64 There, Karatani defines “landscape” as “a constellation which appeared in a nascent form in the literary realism in the 1890s.”65 His argument circles around the classical subject-object opposition to identify a link between the emergence of this modern landscape as external, contemplative space and the “introverted, solitary situation” of the modern bourgeois subject.66 Tayama Katai would be the end result of this perspectival shift, what Karatani calls a tentō, naturalizing in the confessional mode Kunikida Doppo’s early landscapism.67 For Karatani, Kunikida Doppo’s landscapism figured the emergence of a new modern subjectivity, and Katai marked the closure of modern subjectivity in a confessional mode of writing. Despite their differences, this reading of Katai is in line with Kamei Hideo’s work, which emphasizes as well the closure brought by Katai to a sensibility of landscape still open until then to other possibilities as seen in Doppo’s work, in particular “Musashino” and “Unforgettable People.”68 Kamei Hideo was engaged in a project of recovering other forms of subjectivity and historical experiences in Meiji literature, “possibilities that were subsequently lost with the rise of new modes of the realistic novel.”69 Although more aware of the historicity and/as multiplicity of modern Japanese subjectivity, Kamei remained in the end tied to a linear narrative of historical development and a bourgeois subjectivity, which, drawing on phenomenology, had to be defined by alienation. Katai had to constitute for him as well the end point of a narrative of repression of possibilities of subjective life, a repression manifested in the binding and control of nature. Karatani’s claim to unveil an origin as “discovery of” is problematic because what precisely defines a tentō might not be its erasure of origins but precisely its historicity as event, as perspectival shift, thus without origin as such and opened to a variety of actualizations, as Kamei stressed. This is the problem with Karatani’s project: it silences the very historicity of these origins and their openness in order to locate the origins of modern, and more precisely postwar, Japan. As William Haver explains, “‘origin’ or kigen in Karatani’s deployment refers both to the originary ‘event’ of a dialectical tentō, and at the same time to the forgetting and repression of that event . . . origin as the originary forgetting of one’s historicity.”70 Karatani ended up reproducing this forgetting. This is why I return to this classical question of urban landscapism in relation to the figure of the “people-as-landscape” and question their reappearance in Katai’s The Near-Suburb of Tokyo. Drawing

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on Katō Norihiro’s theory of modern landscapism, I argue that Doppo’s landscapism directly informs Katai’s ‘view from the near-suburb,’ albeit not in the terms set forth by Karatani or Kamei. In “The Vanishing of Musashino,”71 the Japanese social critic Katō Norihiro challenges Karatani’s binary theory of a shift induced by the introduction of a Western mode of subjectivity, in particular with the translation of Ivan Turgenev’s works.72 He proposes instead a tripartite system that includes a local history of landscapism. Katō understands here the emergence of a modern Japanese nation, of Japan as such, as the link accounting for a series of displacements in the paradigm of Japanese landscapism. Katō’s texts of reference are here as well Kunikida Doppo’s “Musashino” and “Unforgettable People.” For him, Doppo’s work articulates a shift away from an early modern tradition of landscapism based on the traveler’s aesthetic enjoyment of famous scenic spots (ryokōteki shinbi no taido), an aesthetic practice that had already succeeded in displacing onto physical space the premodern literary tradition of utamakura (pillow poems) and famous places (meisho). Utamakura, literally “poem pillows,” are a category of poetic words often identified with place names—meisho (but not only these)—on which, according to the poet Kamo no Chōmei (1153–1216), “the structure of a poem rests.” As such, utamakura constituted a whole repertoire of poetic associations attached to specific place names and compiled in booklets.73 The characters for meisho can be read nadokoro or tokoro no na and are usually translated as “place with a name” or “celebrated spot.” Henry Smith argues that “the literal meaning of ‘a place with a name,’ however, better conveys the oldest sense of meisho, as an essentially literary place with conventionalized poetic attributes.”74 In Heian Japan (794–1185), landscapes were identified and appreciated as meisho. From their “use as a device to signify the relation between the Emperor and his land”75 to the visiting of those places of historical memory by ascetic Buddhist monks in order to experience the evanescence and the truth of life, classical meisho have constituted a landscapism associated with movement in space and time. They were places to be visited, and this travel was allowed by a name that literally makes the place, a place. In premodern Japan, a meisho was always experienced as part of a network of meisho, in reference to a cosmological order centered on the imperial court in Kyoto. As such, meisho always implied a temporal movement and tension between the name and the place, in reference to a geographical position but not necessarily to the actual experience of place as with Tayama Katai. For the consumption of meisho displaced physical movement onto a temporal,

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mental, and spiritual movement reinscribed within an imperial semiotic structure. The classical structure of the meisho thus relied on a tension between the atemporal symbolic structure of poetic associations of the imperial order and the temporal movement between the name and the place, potentially generating a disjuncture from which could emerge a sense of memory, more often than not, a national memory. This sense of a disjunction between words and things, only secondarily related to the experience of the physical place itself, was further emphasized during the Edo era (1603–1868) with the relocation of the political center in the eastern periphery of Japan, a place with few references in imperial semiotics. In contrast to conventional representations of the Japanese landscape modeled on the Kyoto area with its mountains, paddy fields, and valleys, the topography of Edo was characterized by low and expansive lands, from the Musashino plains to the Sumida river. The latter appears in the ninth-century Ise Monogatari in the guise of the miyako-dori (bird of the capital, Kyoto) only to express the separation from the imperial capital in this isolated place at the boundary of Heian Japan.76 The singularity of the topography of Edo in the poetic landscape of classical Japanese poetry thus found its expression in a tension between imitation and innovation in the production of Edo meisho. As Paul Waley shows, the first meisho of Edo were mostly of an imitative nature, chosen by poets who knew better the cultural landscape of Kyoto and its literature. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, Edo meisho were more directly related to actual places of Edo, some artificially created as part of business enterprises.77 This “transformation of meisho during the Edo period from a conceptual to a perceptual notion”78 was related to both the establishment of a new political center in a cultural desert at the margin of the Japanese territory and the emergence of a more empirically minded relation to the world, for example, in the travel writings of the neo-Confucian scholar Kaibara Ekiken (1630– 1714). Ekiken’s travel writings marked a shift “from passive appreciation to active observation,” linked in particular with “the shift toward empiricism, or ‘practical,’ learning (jitsugaku) advocated during the reforms launched by Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751) during the Kyōhō era (1716–1736), and the incorporation of ideals of order gleaned from the Chinese classics into the genre of travel writing.”79 According to Katō Norihiro, in the modern era this early modern aesthetic enjoyment of landscape was in turn displaced by a modern sensibility for anonymous places associated with the everyday space of local dwellers. Whereas early modern meisho were characterized both by the experience of the physical place and their inclusion in a network of beautiful places attached

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to an imperial literary tradition, in modern Japan, meisho are emptied out of the literary associations that gave them value and form, to be absorbed into the anonymous space of a natural and national landscape structured by the movement of the train. Space is flattened out and “neutralized,” and what generates the experience of place is no longer the reference to a textual tradition but rather the historical encounter with the everyday space of local people. Yet this is not simply a matter of appreciation of place through rejection of a reified tradition in favor of a true experience of place—a tension already existing during the Edo period. The important point here is the character of anonymity a priori attributed to the landscape and its dwellers. In other words, there is no privileging of one position over another in the modern landscape. In a sense, places disappear and are subsumed into the immensity of a natural landscape traversed by anonymous travelers and opened to the emergence of dwelling places in any place whatever. Pushing Katō’s argument on anonymity, this does not necessarily mean a homogenization of space but rather the possibility of a copresence of multiple temporalities of place and of place experiences, brought together by the passing of the train. In other words, anonymity is not necessarily homogeneity and rather tends to express the uneven, if banal, everyday quality of modern landscapes as they are relocated within a national space of exchange and circulation. In Doppo’s “Musashino,” published in 1898, there is a famous scene that exemplifies the nature of place experience in the Tokyo near-suburb: One summer about three years ago, I and a friend of mine left our temporary dwelling in the city and boarded a train which took us as far as Sakai. There we alighted from the train and walked about half a mile to the North until we came to a small bridge known as Sakura-bashi. Just across the bridge, we stopped at a teahouse. The old woman asked us why we had come that way, whereupon my friend and I looked at each other and laughed. “We’ve come for a stroll. Just for pleasure,” we said. Then it was her turn to laugh, for she seemed to regard us as fools. “Don’t you know that the cherry blooms in the spring?” she said. Of course, it was quite useless for us to attempt to explain to her the pleasures of strolling in the outlying districts of Tokyo in the summer as well as in the spring. To her we were just carefree people from Tokyo. So we just wiped the sweat from our brows and ate the melon the old woman prepared for us. Then we washed our faces in the waters of a small stream which flowed past the teahouse and left. This stream probably was part of the Koganei system and its waters were very clear as it threaded its delightful way amidst the green vegetation on its banks.

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From time to time tiny, chirruping birds flew up, flapping their wings as if waiting for an opportunity to quench their thirst in the stream. To this, however, the old woman paid no heed, seeming to regard the stream as there morning and night for her convenience to wash her pots and pans in.80

The old woman met by the narrator and his friend at her teahouse does not understand why they came at the wrong time, when the cherry trees are not blossoming. They are coming in summer to this meisho famous for its cherry trees, as indicated by the name of the nearby bridge, Cherry Tree (sakura) Bridge. But what interests them is just the place as it is, at the time they go there. Their experience of place is not for them determined by external aesthetic conventions or the tourism industry but only by its everyday transient temporality. They left for a walk and came upon this place, to which the old woman can only laugh derisively. What is this everyday they discover there? For the everyday of the old woman is precisely defined by these aesthetic conventions, which allow her to own this little business in the plain of Musashino and live there. Are they even interested in the life of this woman? At the time the story was written, the Koganei area in the western part of Tokyo had not yet been integrated into the railway system and new urban areas such as Yoyogi, where Katai moved a few years later. And yet Doppo’s Musashino was already part of the near-suburb. Those modern urbanites do not feel any attraction to the scenic spots valued until then in aesthetic codes; “on the contrary, one feels an attraction to what had come to be viewed as ordinary sceneries, deciduous forests and thickets spread out on the plain, that liminal space lying at the border between the city and the country.”81 This is not here a matter of a sublime experience, and in that respect it is not a question of liminality either. What makes the aesthetic quality of those landscapes is their urban everydayness, their banal anonymity, and how they bring together the two polarities of city and rural life, making it impossible to distinguish both. The Sakura Bridge episode, as urban experience, is revealing: contrary to Kamei Hideo’s reading, we do not have here a “passerby who enters into this [self-sufficient world in which people and nature were in harmony and] forces onto this nature a gaze that captures it as a landscape.”82 This nature was already a commodified space, suspended in Doppo’s story by both a sighting (rather than a gaze) and an experience of dis-communication caused by the encounter between two everyday cartographies. The passersby might actually be the “people-as-landscape,” circulated through the commodified space of the near-suburb, emerging in the perspectival movement between the domestic space of use value and the public space of exchange. Kamei

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interpreted Doppo’s work as “a critique of the kikōbun [travelogue] genre (and its authorial position), which treats the other as a part of the landscape to be gazed at in passing, with no attempt made to query its relationship to the gazing self.”83 Against this reading relying on the positing of a phenomenological subject addressed by and always alienated from the silent inner voices of “people-as-landscape” in their intimate communication with nature, I argue here for a different subject of experience, an urban subject emerging in the local encounter of the road and the land. The traveler is gendered male, and as Pratt argues, this allows him to move freely and ignore aesthetic conventions that the locals and women in particular need to live—in this case, the old lady running a business for tourists. He has the leisure to enjoy these anonymous landscapes as anonymous. This critique works if by “anonymous” we understand the homogenization of a space of international flows, a process brought about first by the railway network. However, something else happens when anonymity also points at the uneven historicity of places where memories of various ages are allowed to coexist in the passing of urban dwellers. In terms of landscapism, it is important that we have here a bridge. For Georg Simmel, writing in 1909, the bridge constitutes the ideal landscape, because it figures the human “will to connection” of separate elements.84 This “will to connection” is at work in Kafū’s celebratory view of the Sumida estuary (see next chapter) as well as the various views from the Imado bridge, beautiful landscapes that hold together for an instant before leaking, carried away by water flows. Doppo’s Sakura Bridge too exemplifies this “will to connection” of various times and places allowed precisely by the banal experience of dwelling characteristic of urban modernity. When, during his trip to Koganei with his older brother, at other times his wife, Katai reads the time of the year in terms of water flows carrying or not carrying cherry blossoms he experiences the near-suburb as a bridge connecting a multiplicity of times and flows. This explains why for Katō, this scene figures a shift from the aesthetic appreciation of the traveler to that of the dweller (teijūshateki shinbi no taido)85—a dweller who is not owning or occupying a place but simply passing through an urban landscape. Those travelers are not really interested in the everyday living space of the old woman, or in her business, and they are also detached from their own assigned place in society. As Katō remarks, it is also doubtful that the old woman can conceive of her everyday dwelling place in aesthetic terms. Landscape is here not defined either in relation to wild nature because it is already integrated into a human geography, the Koganei water system, and the birds living around the stream. Dwelling is not defined by labor, even less by longing, but by the act of passing. If there

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is an everyday here, it is that of the urban travelers who experience this dwelling place in passing. This is not the urbanite dreaming of living in the country but rather the urbanite passing through a dwelling place, where the old woman is merely there, attached to the landscape, already turning into “people-as-landscape.” As Alex Bates explains, “Doppo’s narrator sees the boundaries between the self and the external world disappear, but this is due not to the negation of the self, but to the expansion of the self to feel the world.”86 And yet, this self is not sovereign, because made to pass; if anything is sovereign, it is place. Katō further refines his argument by referring to Doppo’s “Unforgettable People,” also published in 1898. In this short story, the writer Ōtsu and the painter Akiyama are defined by a proper name and a location, the room they share and in which they drink away the night. They constitute a third category of humans uprooted from any socio-historical ties (having or not a professional activity does not define them), and the landscape they traverse is really just a landscape. This factuality of landscape, this “third landscape” as Katō calls it, has nothing to do with the interiority of a modern individual. It is not the “landscape as landscape” argued for by Karatani, implying the self-reflexive interiority of a modern individual subject.87 The “Unforgettable People” described in the manuscript Ōtsu shows Akiyama are neither defined by their dwelling nor opposed to the one of city dwellers. The relation between travelers and local dwellers is thus not defined by the codified aesthetic appreciation of the premodern traveler, nor exactly by their opposition to the space of the city, for they are all already urban. These urban subjects are generated by a new sense of place, what I call the view from the near-suburb, which sense does not completely match that of the bourgeois alienated subject, which grounds Karatani’s and Kamei’s theory of landscapism. In the end, however, there is still a sense in Doppo’s stories that one can only encounter the everyday through the position of the male voyeur, taking in with his gaze what he cannot have. But the point is that this taking in of the landscape in the near-suburb is not an act of appropriation in a closed view from a fixed subjective position. The urban dweller passing in the near-suburb becomes himself one of those “people-as-landscape,” testifying to the emergence and disappearance of dwelling places. “Peopleas-landscape” are not Ōgai’s bystanders caught between the consumption of the urban spectacle and urban circulation, nor are they urban strollers. They are anonymous figures moved in place, leaping in place. As such, Katai’s The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, far from exemplifying a simple binding of nature, in fact further expands on Doppo’s landscapism in the genre of travel writing.

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Travelogue Writing, Planetary Souths, and Urban Studies Katai’s travelogues thus constituted a form of cartographic writing playing on the tension between the land (chi), the map (zu), and an observing subject testifying to this observational experience. The question was how to find a balance between objective description of place, objective description of the observational experience of place, and the necessary technological mediation of pen, print technology, cartography, and photography. In a 1911 essay on fiction writing entitled “On Representation,” Katai argues that the aim of “flat depiction” (heimen byōsha) in fiction writing is to take “the raw scene that enters the brain through the eye and attempt to recreate that scene as it is on the surface of the page” without adding interpretation, even less moral judgment. In this essay, Katai uses byōsha interchangeably with saigen (replication or “recreation”), as if the goal of flat depiction, that is, of a writing that necessarily happens at the surface of things, would be photography. Objective depiction was not however the aim of surface writing: rather, he advocated a “fluid writing that blends with the ‘rhythms of nature.’”88 In other words, what flat depiction and photography paint is not so much a neutral and the faithful representation of a scene, nor simply the experience of this scene but first the rhythm, that is, the affective and differential movement that holds together the scene and the experience of the scene for an observer. And although Katai alluded to “rhythms of nature,” he was well aware of the technological mediation at work in his time, starting with new urban experiences. His “rhythms of nature” were nothing else but the uneven movement of emergence of the urban planetary. Katai thus called for a “spectatorial attitude” (bōkanteki taido) detached from “the author and the phenomenal world,”89 an impersonal anonymous and yet individual writer. Plot and references to the social in novelistic fiction always disturb the recounting of a pure experience. The work of writing consisted then in navigating this unresolvable tension between objective representation of an experience, the social setting, and its relation to a natural environment, the urban planetary. In another essay published the same year, Katai opposes the position of the narrator as bystander in novelistic writing to the travelogue narrator, embedded in the landscape, and his lyrical descriptions.90 For Katai, travelogues are necessarily fictions, not only because they are constructed but also because they attend to a local experience of travel defined by punctual encounters between the land and the road. Descriptions in travelogues are characterized by an essential contradiction, a claim to objectivity,

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the mediated knowledge of the local human geography and cartographic accuracy, and the immediacy of the observational experience of the traveler accounted for in the travelogue. It is no surprise then to see a gradual shift in his travelogues from a focus on the internal experience of the individual traveler to an observational experience that arises after dispelling the self, “a heart that has discarded the self and wants to see the land.”91 This is why there is for Katai no harmonious relation possible between both sides of travelogue writing. And it is precisely this slight opening, this gap that cannot be sutured in writing, that allows for a communication of experiences across time, place, and texts, a shuddering that moves us at the surface of things as we learn to dwell in passing. Katai’s text is punctuated by photographs of the near-suburb, emphasizing how its landscapes always leak, at the surface, never adding up to a total image. Katai himself was familiar with photography and cinematography being a member of the Tokyo Photo Club from 1900 and commissioned by Hakubunkan in 1904 to be part of their “camera squad” (shashinhan) to prepare a photo-magazine journal on the Russo-Japanese War—this is when he first met Mori Ōgai who remained a long-lasting friend. I now conclude this chapter by discussing Katai’s travelogue writing and his use of photography in relation to Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on the relation between urban dwelling and photography. For both thinkers, photographs are not illustrations: they participate in the movement that generates urban dwelling places. Nancy draws a direct analogy between urban space and photography: “And as photography, it [urban space] dissipates in itself the enduring essence of a place as a configuration of presence, with a light suspension of time (as can represent a clearing, a field, or the curve of a road).”92 As photography, urban space is punctuated by places where a multiplicity of experiences are temporarily suspended to give shape and orientation to a dwelling experience defined by unevenness. This explains Nancy’s dismissal of urban landscapes as commonly understood: The expression sometimes used of “an urban landscape” contains a contradiction: the landscape embraces a totality (which does not mean that a totality cannot be open, but it is first opened in itself and in the end, on itself) while urbanity—or maybe should we say urbanicity to forge a term that does not connote a supposed refinement of urban customs—is on the contrary made of un-totalizable co-existences.93

For Nancy, urban landscapes are forms of totalization based on the necessary separation and opposition of subject and object, Simmel’s “the tragedy of culture.”94 Whereas modern urban space precisely emerges from

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the coexistence of differences in movement without fusion or separationalienation, the two polarities of the modern alienated subject. In The NearSuburb of Tokyo there is no formal difference between a panoptic and a local view. Photographs of the near-suburb never completely become Schivelbusch’s panoramic views, alienated from the urban dweller unable to engage its urban surfaces.95 For the observing subject is forced to remain at the surface and engage with the surface, opaque and flowing. The first photograph included in the book is an aerial view of the Musashino plain (figure 2.1). This photograph as read by the narrator of the travelogue claims to be a panoramic view embracing the whole landscape of the Tokyo near-suburb. Yet the actual status of this image is unclear. The text claims to present an exemplary image of Musashino: “If pictured in my head, what first comes to mind is the vast scenery of the past—a lonely past, just natural and untouched by human affairs.”96 Untouched but for roads frequented by tired travelers and warriors coming back from such battlefields as Bubaigawara (figure 2.2), where the Hōjō forces fought and lost against Nitta Yoshisada’s army. This battle opposing the Nitta army to the Shogunal army of the Hōjō happened in 1333 and led to the demise of the Kamakura Shogunate (1185– 1333) as is mentioned in the fourteenth-century historical epic Taiheiki.97 Yet the text does not give any date, and this is precisely the point. The image of the battle is a pure memory, without a date. Such memories are more than Bergsonian memory-images, because memory-images point toward the actualization of particular memories for action. “Musashino” is rather an image-thought circulating between the text and the two photographs. In the series of photographs included in The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, the landscape always vacillates between an opaque surface, the façade of a modern

Figure 2.1  Musashino (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 3). National Diet Library

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Figure 2.2  Bubaigawara Old Battle Field (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 77). National Diet Library

Figure 2.3  Grave of Itō Hirobumi (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 207). National Diet Library

meisho closed to the traveler, and continuous urban flows. The photograph of the grave of the Meiji statesman Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909, figure 2.3) is a good example. This frontal view of the closed gate does not allow the viewer to penetrate this space shut off by the white walls enclosing the memorial. The decentered gate in fact encourages us to follow the road along the walls. Similarly, the view of the ruined Kokubunji temple (figure 2.4) is frontal and distanced, carried away by the flow of time in what used to be a famous Edo meisho. It is the text, however, that opens those spaces to the inquisitive gaze, to enjoy the gorgeous garden of Itō’s last resting place and its cherry trees. The views of Nihonbashi (figure 2.5) and of the Tama river (figure 2.6) in turn emphasize the flows of urban space. The camera moves along a line of movement, road or river, without a clear sense of depth, of separation of foreground and background. This double orientation of the photographic image in Katai’s text sustains a melancholic urban subject, an urban voyant, This urban subject emerges

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Figure 2.4  Kokubunji (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 73). National Diet Library

Figure 2.5  Nihonbashi (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 12). National Diet Library

Figure 2.6  Tama River (The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 24). National Diet Library

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as a mobile point of view, the effect of a perspectival movement between multiple positions, multiple mappings of space crystallizing in a local image of movement. The crystal is a concept developed by Gilles Deleuze in his book on cinema, in reference to Guy de Maupassant, “who often sees things through a pane, before following their course on a river.”98 Deleuze argues that Maupassant displaced the entropic temporality of naturalism and its deep impulses (pulsions) onto a façade, the view of a traveler looking at the flat surface of a glass window while being carried away, leaking in place.99 In this respect, Kobayashi was doubly wrong when condemning Katai’s writings, for the latter perfectly understood the historical context Maupassant was working on, this tension between deep passions and surfaces carried away by the movement of planetary urbanization. Time is the subject of The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, the passing of time, what Nancy calls “the subtraction of a presence”100 that is being suspended for a melancholic and pathic subject to pass. The pathic here is not exactly a presubjective mode of relating with the world, ignoring the working of what the phenomenologist Erwin Strauss calls “the gnostic mode” and its reliance on the perception of a formed object by an individual subject.101 It is a question of expression, of oscillation at the surface of the train window, between two perspectives onto the world, now associated with the flowing surfaces of Tokyo waters, now either leaving the glassy surface or entering further into the spectacle of urban speed. Tayama Katai’s near-suburb is a space where for a time urban subjects can learn to dwell in passing while opening themselves to a planetary urban movement. But this experience of the nearsuburb disappears in the central areas of the capital: “Today, the banks of the Sumida have for the most part lost their near-suburb atmosphere. From the near-suburb they have completely passed into Tokyo. The embankment of Mukōjima for example has a complete urban atmosphere.”102 Urbanization is complete in the urban center, whereas the near-suburb still shows the uneven movement of urbanization in the passing of the train, opening a line of escape into the urban planetary. By adopting the “view from the near-suburb,” I showed how Katai’s text displaces the binary logic of centrality (center-periphery) that grounds the modern urban alienated subject. As I discussed the Tokyo near-suburb in terms of a shift toward an experience of place defined by anonymity, the urban subject as melancholic witness and the uneven encounter of the land and the road, everyday experiences of urbanization and suburban development took an unusual form, figured by the old road station rather than the modern middle-class household. One does not deny the other, but the near-suburb points at a different dimension

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of urban experiences, one that leaks away from the urban lights of the center. This shift resonates with contemporary debates in urban studies that pay closer attention to the modalities of urban living and urban dwelling forms in the urban planetary, a situation that cannot be explained in terms of the classical binaries of center and periphery, city and country, place and space that have defined urban theory in the Global North. By taming the urban planetary, Western urban theory has shadowed its planetary ground, the planetary souths found beside as well as within urban centers of the Global North. The “view from the near-suburb” found in Katai’s work allows us to queerize urban theory and show how the (un)ground of urban modernity, its planetary situation, comes to the surface in local dwelling places such as old road stations. To conclude, I want to return to the second epigraph of this chapter and the short essay wherein Nancy defined the ville as “the place of a hospitality—the hotel and the hospital—which is not the welcoming in the place and symbolic bond of the house, but the station [halte], itself mobile, the punctation of an itinerary and its freeze-frame.”103 Halte is an interesting word that implies not so much an arrest-in-place as a suspension on an itinerary, a moment to rest, and also the place where this moment is condensed and immediately exploded into a multiplicity of possible trajectories. The halte is mobile, literally a station, the minimum dwelling unit of the ville. For Nancy, the ville, closer to the Roman villa than to the Greek city, is on the side of both travel and home, a temporary and mobile station for the traveler that “unfolds in itself the form of a transport that relates it to itself: a road, or a travel.”104 This is an interesting tension, analogous to the one in Katai’s work between tokai and no, although the very term tokai implies more directly the idea of a gathering in place. Urban dwelling places are temporary stations in an urban landscape of movement that constitutes a milieu without exterior as such: it is “not a frame, nor a region, but is rather a support, a mi-lieu [half-place], between places, between ban-lieues and the ‘faux’-bourgs.”105 Urban space needs places, but “it first unbridles localities, blurs them and puts them in movement.”106 This definition of the urban is at odds with Nancy’s better-known critique of globalization and/as urbanization, in which he deplores the loss of a world articulated by the tension between city and country brought about by globalization. By erasing the distinction between the urban and the nonurban, the urban would become in globalization a network without world, an “agglomeration” worsening inequalities of all sorts, while the world— always Western for Nancy—would have lost its capacity to world (faire monde). The problem is that this pessimistic view, embraced for too long by urban scholars, cannot account for the urban lives and dwelling forms

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found in the peripheries, internal and external, of the Global North, in what I call planetary souths.107 Recent works such as Ash Amin and Michele Lancione’s edited volume Grammars of the Urban Ground are now regenerating the field by paying closer attention to how urban dwellers explore and experiment with ways to dwell together even, or rather particularly, in situations of extreme inequality and precarity.108 This recent evolution of urban studies is in itself nothing new and as I argue in this book resonates with questions raised by urban modernity from its heyday. What is at stake for urban studies today is thus not so much to stress the newness of our present situation but rather, as Natalie Oswin argues, to recover the shadowy presence of urban lives, queer lives sidelined by mainstream urban theory and its desire to contain and order the urban.109 “Queer” here is not limited to the everyday practices of sexual minorities but refers to any practices that keep leaking away from statist and capitalistic orderings in order to generate other landscapes in which to dwell in passing. Planetary souths and the queer readings they call for are not an ontology but an experiment, attempting to figure and narrate the observational experience of everyday dwelling experiences. To discuss urban dwelling experiences as a question of form, then, means to displace the centrality of the ideology of the bourgeois domus and pay attention to dwelling forms that allow for a dwelling in passing to be figured and narrated, here in cartographic modes. Nancy’s other theory of the urban, read alongside Katai’s travelogues, is thus particularly useful because it articulates an urban dwelling form, the station (halte), that is both evanescent and grounded in a space of flow, emerging in place and always leaking away. The station is in tension with the shelter that characterizes a planetary situation. It offers a temporary shelter, yet it also endures in place and becomes a historical landscape testifying to the uneven process of planetary urbanization.

Notes 1. Ōki Takatō was a retainer of the Saga Han. I thank Professor Wakabayashi Mikio for pointing out the role of the mulberry policy in the making of a narrative of modern urban planning. 2. The bushi (warriors) were, during the Edo era (1603–1868), at the top of the social structure and constituted one of the four neo-Confucian statuses (with peasants, craftsmen, and merchants). 3. “La ville, pour sa part, se rapporte autant au moins au voyage qu’à la demeure. Cette dernière est aussi bien rurale. Mais la ville fait station et séjour pour celui qui ne demeure pas, pour le voyageur.” Jean-Luc Nancy, “Trafic/Déclic,” in Les villes de Nancy, ed. Benoît Goetz (Strasbourg: La Phocide, 2010), 13. Nancy’s short essay was originally published in a book on Nicolas Faure's photography: Faure, Portraits

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/ Chantiers (Geneva: Éditions Mamco, 2004); all the translations are mine. Nancy emphasizes the distinction between the cité, associated with the Greek model of the social, and the ville, which he understands to be closer to the model of the station in tension with the Latin rural domus, the villa. 4. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 5. The Near-Suburb of Tokyo was first published in 1916 at Hakubunkan. All page numbers and citations refer to the second 1920 edition with a revised title, The NearSuburb of Tokyo: One- or Two-Day Trips (Tokyo: Isobe Kōyōdō). Hereafter, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo. Available online at https://dl​.ndl​.go​.jp​/pid​/961001. 6. AbdouMaliq Simone, “Deformation: Remaking Urban Peripheries through Lateral Comparison,” in Grammars of the Urban Underground, ed. Ash Amin and Michele Lancione (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 207. Also Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Seeing Like a City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). 7. Sian Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 214. 8. As I discuss in the last chapter, Katai’s landscapism is in line with both Yanagita Kunio and Kon Wajirō, each in their own way affirming a landscapism that is inclusive of everyday lives, human and nonhuman. 9. Christophe Hill, Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form (Northwestern University Press, 2020). Hill draws on Harry Harootunian’s work, arguing that this temporal and social unevenness is a characteristic of peripheral nation-states such as Italy or Japan that, modernizing at accelerated pace, were defined by formal subsumption (whereby one makes with what one has at hands, starting with inherited practices and skills). 10. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 110. 11. In addition to Seidensticker’s work on Kafū, his two volumes on the history of Tokyo remain essential to the understanding of modern Tokyo in the academic world, in Japan, Asia, Europe, and America: Edward Seidensticker, Kafū The Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafu, 1879–1959 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965); Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 12. Wakabayashi Mikio, “Toshi no keikan / kōgai no keikan” [The Landscape of the City / The Landscape of the Suburb], in ‘Keikan’ wo saikō suru [Reconsidering ‘landscape’], ed. Matsubara Ryūichirō, Arayama Masahiko, Satō Kenji, Wakabayashi Mikio, and Abiko Kazuyoshi (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2004), 194. 13. Inoue Kota, “The Suburb as Colonial Space in Modern Japanese Literature and Cinema” (PhD dissertation: University of California, Irvine, 2004). 14. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994). 15. Inoue, “The Suburb as Colonial Space,” 4. 16. For an introductory analysis of the imaginary of the suburb and the garden city in Japanese modern literature see Angela Yiu, “‘Beautiful Town’: The Discovery of

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the Suburbs and the Vision of the Garden City in Late Meiji and Taishō Literature,” Japan Forum 18, no. 3 (2006): 315–316. For a historical analysis of the garden city phenomenon in the Tokyo area, see Yamaguchi Hiroshi, ed., Kōgai jūtakuchi no keifu: Tōkyō no den’en yūtopia [A genealogy of suburban housing areas: The garden city utopia of Tokyo] (Tokyo: Kajima, 1987). 17. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986): 65–88. Although Jameson’s argument is subtle and should be understood as a strategic provocation, its appropriation and application in the field of East Asian Studies, in particular Chinese and Japanese literature, has tended to close down the discussion of the relation between nationhood and imperialism in a reductive interpretational framework. A good example of a work that intelligently navigates the conundrum of Jameson’s idea is James Fujii’s reading of Natsume Sôseki’s Kokoro (1914) as national allegory, or its lack thereof: James Fujii, “Death, Empire, and the Search for History in Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro,” in Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1993), 126–150. 18. Inoue, “The Suburb as Colonial Space,” 9. 19. Maeda Ai, “In the Recesses of the High City: On Soseki’s Gate” (1982), trans. William F. Sibley, in Text and the City: Essays in Japanese Modernity, ed. James Fujii (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 337. Maeda draws on Barthes’s essay “Sémiologie et urbanisme” in L’aventure sémiologique (Paris: Seuil, 1985). As explained in a footnote to page 349, Sibley here translates the Japanese kōgai as “non-central locales” and later “outlying residential districts,” rather than the more common “suburb,” to avoid confusion with the American meaning of “an adjacent town or village with its own administrative autonomy.” This, he explains, is because the kōgai Maeda refers to are in many cases under the jurisdiction of the Municipality of Tokyo. They are in fact near-suburbs, neither center nor periphery and both at the same time, which is why Barthes’s center/periphery model does not work either. 20. Kobayashi Hideo, “Watakushi shōsetsu ron” (1935), in Kindai bungaku hyōron taikei [Compendium of modern literary criticism], ed. Takahashi Haruo and Hoshô Masao (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1972); translated as “Discourse on Fiction of the Self,” in Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo: Literary Criticism 1924–1939, trans. Paul Anderer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 21. James Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2009), 62–63. 22. Indra Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore: The Westernesque Femme Fatale, Translation, and Vernacular Style in Modern Japanese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Levy however does acknowledge, like Kobayashi, Katai’s innovative writing style and techniques used to depict his characters. 23. Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 10. 24. Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore, 119.

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25. Matthew Fraleigh, “Terms of Understanding: The Shōsetsu According to Tayama Katai,” Monumenta Nipponica 58, no. 1 (Spring, 2003): 43–78. 26. Mary Louise Pratt, Planetary Longings (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022). 27. Yamamoto Matsumasa, Edo kenbutsu to Tōkyō kankō [Edo sightseeing and Tokyo tourism] (Tokyo: Rinkawa Sensho, 2005). 28. According to Peter Kornicki, the first modern Japanese exposition (hakurankai) took place in Kyoto in 1871. Peter Kornicki, “Public Display and Changing Values: Early Meiji Exhibitions and Their Precursors,” Monumenta Nipponica 496, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 184. 29. Kentaro Tomio argues that the Meiji expositions put on display a national space of consumption and “produce[d] the nation-state as Empire.” Kentaro Tomio, “Visions of Modern Space: Expositions and Museums in Meiji Japan,” in New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan, ed. Helen Hardacre (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 719– 733. See also Yoshimi Shunya, Hakurankai no seikigaku [The politics of exhibitions] (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1992); and Aso Noriko, Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 30. The Guide to Entertainment in Tokyo, published by the Municipality of Tokyo for the 1907 Tokyo Industrial Exposition, is a good example of this transition: Tōkyō Yūran Annai (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1907). 31. “Tōkyō shimin no kōraku” [Tokyo citizens’ outings], chapter 5 of Yamamoto Matsumasa, Edo kenbutsu to Tōkyō kankō, 179–199. 32. Tayama Katai, Tōkyō no sanjūnen [Thirty years in Tokyo] (1917), in Teihon Katai zenshū [Complete works of Katai], ed. Kobayashi Ichirō (Kyoto: Rinsen Shoten, 1994); translated by Kenneth G. Henshall, in Literary Life in Tokyo 1885–1915: Tayama Katai’s Memoirs (Thirty Years in Tokyo) (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1987). This autobiographical account of Katai’s life growing up in Tokyo is valorized for its realistic description of the Tokyo literary world (bundan) and everyday life in Tokyo and as such constitutes the basis of most of the sociocultural studies of Katai. Katai’s travelogues however are equally, if not more, important to understand Katai’s relation with urban space and his writing style too easily subsumed under the umbrella term “I-novel.” 33. Saitō Gesshin’s Guide to the Famous Places of Edo [Edo meisho zue] is an illustrated guide that systematically describes the famous places, meisho, of late Edo. First published in 1834, its success led to the publication of an expanded version in 1836. While the structure of this guide reflects the cosmological order of the Tokugawa Shogunate, it becomes in Katai’s text an ahistorical glossary of geographical places, the appreciation of which relies, in the end, on the experience of passing through these places rather than their description in the guide. Saitō Yukio, Saitō Yukitaka, and Saitō Gesshin, Edo meisho zue, in Nihon meisho fūzoku zue, vol. 4, ed. Asakura Haruhiko (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1980). 34. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 2–3. 35. Amin and Thrift, Seeing Like A City, 16.

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36. Katai, “Out in the Western Suburbs” [Yamanote no kūki], in Thirty Years in Tokyo, 93. Quoted in Maeda Ai, “In the Recesses of the High City,” 331. 37. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 1. 38. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 2–3. 39. Wherever you go, human artifice is added. Too much is added. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 19. 40. Goi Makoto, “Tetsudō, ‘Nihon’, byōsha: Tayama Katai no kikōbun ‘Kusamakura’ wo megutte” [Railway, Japan, description: On Tayama Katai’s kikōbun “Kusamakura”], Nishōgakusha 43 (2000): 53–75. The classical starting point in any discussion of kikōbun as a national, Japanese, writing genre is usually the Tosa Diary [Tosa Nikki, 935] of Ki no Tsurayuki (872-945): Tsurayuki Ki, The Tosa Diary, trans. William N. Porter (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1981). 41. Katazyna Bartiszyńka, Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2021), 18. 42. Katai, “Introductory Remarks” (Hanrei) to The Tokyo Near-suburb. 43. Miyauchi Shunsuke, “Shoki Tayama Katai ron: Kikōbun to shōsetsu to no tanima” [Early Tayama Katai discourse: Between the travelogue and the novel], Geibun kenkyū 36 (1977): 222–233. 44. Kobayashi Ichirō, “Kaisetsu” [Commentary], in Tōkyō kinkō ichinichi no kōraku (Tokyo: Kyōyō bunko, 1991), 292. 45. Mochida Nobuko, “Kikōbun no jidai to kindai shōsetsu no seisei: shusakki no Tayama Katai wo chūshin ni” [The age of the travelogue and the generation of the modern novel: About early Tayama Katai], Kōkugakuin Zasshi 87, no. 7 (1986–87): 13–29. 46. Narita Ryūichi, “Bunmei / yaban / ankoku” [Civilization / barbary / darkness], in Yoshimi Shun’ya ed., 21 seiki no toshi shakaigaku 4: toshi kūkan toshi no shintai [21st century urban sociology 4: Urban space, the body of the city] (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1996), 156–167. We can see a similar process in postwar Japan when, as he rewrites Faulkner’s 1929 short story “Barn Burning” in 1984, Murakami Haruki erases the Japanese South and relocates it in Africa. Christophe Thouny, “Burning Barns: Poetics of Fire in Planetary Souths,” symplokē 30, no. 1–2 (2022). 47. “Animals! Westerners look at them as animals, but they really are animals! There’s no way one cannot not look at them as filthy animals. They have utterly lost their humanity.” Quoted in Goi Makoto, “Tetsudō, ‘Nihon’, byōsha,” 60. 48. In this regard, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo is different from Thirty Years in Tokyo, which adopts a more nostalgic tone and laments the loss of a suburban atmosphere in the Ushigome area of Yamanote. It is also different from Katai’s Hiyorigeta, in which on the contrary Katai finds in the hybridity characteristic of Early Meiji Tokyo an energy unequalled in later times (see chapter 3). 49. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 14. 50. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 16. 51. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 16. The French writer Pierre Loti (1850– 1923) traveled to Japan two times, in 1885 where he experienced the Rokumeikan

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culture and a second time in 1900–1901. Katai’s autobiographical Thirty Years in Tokyo refers explicitly to Loti’s. Note that this denigration of Early-Meiji Tokyo is completely opposite to Kafu’s celebration of these early days of Japanese modernity in Fair-weather Clogs, discussed in the next chapter. 52. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 18. 53. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 39. 54. Henri Lefebvre defines modern urban centrality as “the gathering-together and meeting of whatever coexists in a given space.” Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 331. 55. Kuzuwata Masakazu, “Tayama Katai ni okeru kūki to hyōshō– shizenshugi shiron I” [Representation and Atmosphere in Tayama Katai—Attempt at a Theory of Naturalism I], Journal of Japanese Language and Japanese Literature Okinawa International University 20, no. 1 (2015): 1–41. 56. Tayama Katai, “Old Stations” (Koeki), in Tayama Katai-shū 2 (Tayama Katai collection 2) (Tokyo: Sakurashobō, 1909), 255–276. This story, written in the style of a travelogue characteristic of Katai, was first published one year earlier in the magazine Bunshō Sekai published by Hakubunkan Press. For an analysis of “Old Stations” see Ichikawa Hiroaki, “Tayama Katai ‘Koeki’-ron nōto: Katarite no yakuwari to Samejima Shin no zonai, soshite jōkyō to shite no Fujimura shi wo megutte” [Theoretical notes on Tayama Katai’s “Old Stations”: The function of the narrator and the existence of Samejima Shin, and then about Fujimura’s poetry as context], Gakuen 791 (2006): 30–41. 57. Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 85. Also, William J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (University of Chicago Press, 1994). 58. Satō Kenji, “Kindai Nihon no fūkei ishiki” [Modern Japan’s landscape consciousness], in “Keikan” wo saikō suru [Reconsidering “landscape”], ed. Matsubara Ryūichirō, Arayama Masahiko, Satō Kenji, Wakabayashi Mikio, and Abiko Kazuyoshi (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2004), 121–158. 59. The most recent study of Shiga’s work in English is Masako Gavin’s Shiga Shigetaka 1863–1927: The Forgotten Enlightener (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), a study that stresses the complexity of this Japanese thinker, with a clear agenda, that is, to rehabilitate its nationalist project. Gavin’s claim that Shiga was not an ultranationalist complicit in the project of Japanese imperialism is however far from convincing, and it is symptomatic that she translates kokusui-shugi as “defense of Japanese identity.” Kokusui literally means “national essence,” and Shiga’s work was not simply a project of defense of an embattled Japanese nation (although the Western threat was real) but first of all the construction of a modern Japanese identity through the making of an empire—although Shiga ended up not supporting the suicidal drive toward war. 60. Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 38.

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61. Shimazu Toshiyuki, “Rethinking Tayama Katai’s Theory Travel Writing,” Space, Society and Geographical Thought 16 (2013): 47–66. 62. Alex Bates draws this distinction from the opening statements of Katai’s book written in the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Yet it is even more relevant to Katai’s theory of travelogue writing. Alex Bates, The Culture of the Quake: The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Culture of Taishō Japan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2015), 59. 63. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 68. 64. Karatani Kōjin, “The Discovery of Landscape,” in Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. and ed. Brett de Bary (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 11–44. 65. Karatani, “The Discovery of Landscape,” 22. 66. Karatani, “The Discovery of Landscape,” 25. 67. Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908) was a major figure of Meiji literature made famous by his unique lyrical style in his depictions of natural landscapes and the tormented subjectivity of his characters. He is credited as one of the inventors of Japanese naturalism. His work, in particular the two short stories “Musashino” and “Unforgettable People,” has been central to debates on the modern Japanese landscape in relation to subjectivity and the natural. Kunikida Doppo, “Musashino” (1898), in River Mist and Other Stories, trans. David Chibbett (New York: UNESCO, 1983), 97–112. Kunikida Doppo, “Unforgettable People” (1898), in River Mist and Other Stories, trans. David Chibbett (New York: UNESCO, 1983), 36–46. 68. Kamei Hideo, Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature, ed. Michael Bourdaghs (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, 2002). 69. Michael Bourdaghs, “Editor’s Introduction: Buried Modernities – The Phenomenological Criticism of Kamei Hideo,” in The Transformation of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature, trans. Michael Bourdaghs (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 2002), vii–xxviii, ix. 70. William Haver, “A Preface to Translation,” Paper delivered at Cornell University, November 30, 1990, 4. Quoted in Brett de Bary’s introduction to Karatani Kōjin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1980) (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 7. 71. Katō Norihiro, “Musashino no shōmetsu” [The vanishing of Musashino], in Nihon Fūkeiron [Discourses of the Japanese landscape] (Gunshō, 1989; reis. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2000). 72. The role of the translation of Russian literature in the development of a modern Japanese literature remains debated, with some like Kamei Hideo negating it in favor of local literary tradition (Edo kanbun fūzokushi) and others such as Indra Levy rereading the development of Meiji literature as a process of translation and “the Westernesque femme fatale” as “figures of translation.” Levy, Sirens of the Western Shore, 14. 73. Edward Kamens argues that by the time of Kamo no Chōmei (late eleventh to early twelfth centuries), “utamakura, had come to mean, in most of its usages,

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place-name(s) frequently used in poetry to invoke associations and sentiments.” Edward Kamens, Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 5. As Thomas LaMarre argues, our understanding of Heian poetry is heavily indebted to medieval literary criticism that attempted to fix and quantify poetic categories by the use of terms such as utamakura, makurakotoba (pillow-word), and kakekotoba (pivot-word), not extant in Heian literary criticism. This is not the object of the present study, but it would be interesting to tease out the link between the evolution of those literary categories of analysis and the imagination of the imperial realm. Thomas Lamarre, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archeology of Sensation and Inscription (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 60. 74. Henry D. Smith, Hiroshige: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (New York: G. Braziller, 1986), 10. 75. Jilly Traganou, The Tōkaidō Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 69. 76. If you are what your name implies Let me ask you Capital-bird [bird from Kyoto seen on the banks of the Sumida] Does all go well With my beloved ? Tales of Ise: Lyrical Episodes from Tenth-Century Japan, trans. and ed. Helen Craig McCullough (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 76. The Noh play Sumidagawa keeps the same melancholic mood of this place but inverts the gaze to the mother whose child has died on the banks of the Sumida river. 77. Paul Waley, “À la périphérie d’Édo: La Grande rivière et sa rive orientale” (At the periphery of Edo: The great river and its east bank), in La maîtrise de la ville, urbanité française, urbanité nippone (Mastering the city, French urbanity, Japanese urbanity), ed. Augustin Berque (Paris: EEHESS, 1994), 61–66. 78. Traganou, The Tōkaidō Road, 71. Traganou quotes from the Japanese historian of tourism, Ishimori Shūzō. 79. Marcia Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place and Culture in the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 47. 80. Kunikida Doppo, “Musashino,” 108. I have slightly modified David Chibbett’s translation: Musashino’s text is usually read in relation to the emergence of the modern suburb, but not only does Doppo use both kinkō and kōgai, the space of experience he presents, both natural and urban, is actually the kinkō. 81. Kunikida Doppo, “Musashino,” 178. 82. Kamei, Transformations of Sensibility, 279. The same critique can be levied at his reading of Izumi Kyōka, where nature is both the space of primordial forces and a space entirely subjected to the logic of commodity exchange. 83. Kamei, Transformations of Sensibility, 269. 84. Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 170–174.

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85. Katō, “Musashino no shōmetsu,” 177. 86. Bates, The Culture of the Quake, 66. 87. Katō opposes “Tada no fūkei” to Karatani’s “Fūkei to shite no fūkei”: Katō, “Musashino no shōmetsu,” 180. Karatani, “The Discovery of Landscape.” 88. Shu Kuge, “Between Sight and Rhythm: Aspects of Modernity in Tayama Katai’s Flat Depiction,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 14 (2002): 5–38. 89. Bates, The Culture of the Quake, 60–61. 90. Shimazu, “Rethinking Tayama Katai’s Theory of Travel Writing,” 52. 91. Tayama Katai, “Tabi to ryokōki” [Travel and travel records], Chūgaku sekai 12, no. 8 (1909): 76–81. Quoted in Shimazu, “Rethinking Tayama Katai’s Theory of Travel Writing,” 51. 92. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. 93. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 14. 94. Landscape is for Simmel “a pictorial artwork,” an artificial unity of place that, as it reveals the limits of human perception in a framed totality, reopens itself to an open totality of nature from which it had been abstracted by the artist. The pictorial landscape allows the spectator, by way of the “objective distance” it creates, to experience the alienation of the modern subject, torn between the seeing self and the feeling self. Simmel argues that this conception of aesthetics as a mirror for the human self making visible the autonomous movement of life in modern artistic creations is one step ahead of conceptions of aesthetics reducing art to mimesis and play and the process of creation to everyday banalities or a unity of meaning. Georg Simmel, “Philosophie du paysage” (1913) in La tragédie de la culture (Paris: Payot, 2006), 231–245. 95. Schivelbusch argues that in the view from the train window, the foreground is blurred and made invisible, opening onto both a panoramic total view of the background landscape and the interiority of an alienated subject, shut off from its social surroundings and absorbed in the reading of a book. This is in a nutshell the conception of landscape advocated by Karatani but formulated by Schivelbusch in terms of a technological determinism: the panoramic perception emerges as a biological reaction of protection, a defense mechanism against the excess stimuli of speed and the micro-shocks of mechanical movement. This is another understanding of the panoramic, distinct from de Certeau’s opposition of the panoramic and the labyrinthine (as a question of spatial practice) and Maeda Ai’s opposition of perspectival and panoramic space (as a question of visuality and subject position, on which see chapter 1). Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the XIXth Century (1977; reis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 96. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 3. 97. The Taiheiki: A Chronicle of Medieval Japan, trans. Helen Craig McCullough (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). 98. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum: 2005 [1984]), 84. 99. For a reading of Maupassant as an urban writer already engaging a planetary situation see Christophe Thouny, “Pandemic as Recycled Metaphor: Topologies of

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Bourgeois Domesticity in Guy de Maupassant and Mori Ōgai,” in Epidemic and Ritual Practices in Japan, ed. Carmen Sapunaru Tamas and Kathryn M. Tanaka (Bucharest: Pro Universitaria, 2022), 102–125. 100. Nancy, “Trafic / Déclic,” 10. Nancy’s argument still works through the question of negativity to make this point of the social and the city, although suspension is already a positivity, an affirmation. 101. Erwin Strauss distinguishes two modes of relating with the world, the pathic mode and the gnostic mode, each respectively associated with sensing and perception, the how and the what of experience: “The gnostic moment merely develops the what of the given in its object character, the pathic the how of its being as given.” Erwin Strauss, Phenomenological Psychology: Selected Papers of Erwin W. Strauss (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 12. 102. Katai, The Near-Suburb of Tokyo, 179. 103. Nancy, “Trafic / Déclic,” 11. 104. Nancy, “Trafic / Déclic,” 11. 105. Nancy, “Trafic / Déclic,” 13. Nancy makes a number of plays on words to convey the meaning of urban milieu as in-between-ness, space between places, between suburbs (banlieues, places defined by their peripheral position, from the center of political law—ban—to which it is subjected, so first outskirts rather than suburb as such), and faubourgs (urban areas outside of the city walls yet not completely suburban yet; Nancy plays with the popular etymology of faubourg as “false” bourg = city). 106. Nancy, “Trafic / Déclic,” 13. 107. Thouny, “Burning Barns.” 108. Amin and Lancione, Grammars of the Urban. 109. Natalie Oswin, “Social Junk,” in Amin and Lancione, Grammars of the Urban, 27–40.

CHAPTER 3

v

From Production to Attitude Cartographic Heterotopia in Kafū’s Fair-Weather Clogs

I am unusually tall, and I am distinguished by the fact that I always carry an umbrella and wear fair-weather clogs. However bright the day, I never feel safe without my umbrella and fair-weather clogs—for the weather of this perpetually soggy Tokyo is not to be trusted. Nagai Kafū, Hiyorigeta (1915) He elaborated the concept of attitude in order to account for these orientations and changes in position and dimension. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1969)

In a collection of essays entitled Fair-Weather Clogs (Hiyorigeta), Nagai Kafū staged the question of urban experiences in terms of dwelling, temporality, and flows. This approach to Tokyo—its everyday lives and dwelling experiences—resonated with a shift in urban thought from Tokyo as a showcase (Meiji civilization) to Tokyo as a problem (urban culture).1 For the urban had become a new situation, “a new envelope of temporal existence”2 and a dynamic one. As Kafū explains, “the city must, as one’s dwelling place, be appropriate to its everyday time and as a result constantly needs to be rebuilt.”3 The urban planetary calls for new attitudes, that is, new dwelling practices “in order to account for these orientations and changes in position and dimension.” This chapter focuses on two texts: the 1915 collection of urban essays Fair-Weather Clogs and the incomplete novel The River Sumida (1909–1917).4 As in Katai’s travelogues, urban subjects are here again leaking subjects, caught between multiple temporalities in an 109

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uneven space of movement structured in particular by the movement of water. Water in particular becomes a means to map a different sociality based on a concept of movement as flow and to articulate an aesthetics of the beautiful for which place is defined by its leakages and dwelling by temporary shelters, in particular island refuges. Both texts ask us what the beautiful is when the social is defined by leakage, place by evanescence, and when the capital of a young imperialist nation-state becomes a typology of waters. Water here narrates the planetary and planetary urbanization in terms of the littoral city and its island refuges. Drawing on recent work in urban studies by Matthew Gandy5 and the planetary turn, I argue that water has always been a motor for change of urban forms, and that it allows us to engage with the urban planetary by paying particular attention to how its queer ecologies and urban atmospheres displace the hegemonic mappings of the modernist city. From his short stories and novels to his essays and diaries, Nagai Kafū’s writings are characterized by a concern and interest for everyday experiences in urban modernity. Urban space and Tokyo in particular constitute for Kafū the ground for staging a variety of urban narratives in terms of fleeting encounters and temporary dwelling experiences in the plebeian area of Shitamachi. At the same time, these narratives constitute a search for the beautiful, for beautiful dwelling places as temporary shelters in the midst of ongoing change induced by the modernization of the new capital. Kafū is a modern flâneur, albeit one characterized by his strong distrust of the Tokyo weather and for this reason always carries an umbrella and wears fair-weather clogs (hiyorigeta). The umbrella and hiyorigeta compose a mobile dwelling form suspended between earth and sky and completed by a navigational tool, the late Edo maps (Edo kiriezu) that Kafū always carried with him when walking the city. Contrary to some common readings of Kafū’s work, he is not a nostalgic subject but one actively engaging with the uneven reality of urban modernity and its possibilities for other dwelling experiences. For Kafū embraces the new structure of flow of the capital, the flows of the littoral city. Following the view from the near-suburb and its focus on decentered land flows and uneven temporalities of transport and communication, I now turn to the view from water in order to examine Tokyo as a littoral city. This is however not a simple opposition between water and land, as in Maeda Ai’s and Edward Seidensticker’s work, but a view of different flows, of qualitatively different and diverging modes of dwelling in and navigating the urban. There are certainly similarities between theses modes of circulation and exchange: in both Katai and Kafū we find a tension with the continental and nation-centered production of national spaces and their mode of control of movement following a center-periphery dialectic. This is why both the

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near-suburb and the littoral city are not about liminality but rather about a planetary perspective that articulates the landscapism holding these urban layers together without fusing them. If the near-suburb, its uneven landscapes and its anonymous travelers, is a degree zero of urbanicity as argued in the previous chapter, the view from water further intensifies the unevenness and hybridity of the urban. As Meg Samuelson argues, the littoral city is a question of porosity, what she calls “coastal porosity”: “the coast is alternatively porous, perilous, and patrolled [. . .][which] requires us to think simultaneously in terms of permeability and ‘fault lines.’”6 On the coast, liminality and ideas of in-betweenness do not work because of the entanglement of sea and land, water and roads. This is why Kafū’s water flows bring together rivers, canals, and the labyrinth of backstreets surviving in the interstices of the Japanese capital. The perspectivalism of the literal city intensifies the planetary perspective of the view from the near-suburb, with hospitality, circulation, and ruptures giving us a vista on both the globe and planetary forces. As in Ōgai and Katai, there is in Kafū’s urban writings a sort of melancholia at work. It is about dwelling with loss, although loss here is not reduced to the national ideology of the lost home: it is about an ongoing movement of change across urban layers and their diverging temporalities. Rather than melancholia, however, it is the affect of paranoia that colors these texts. Although Kafū frames his reflections in terms of a sense of national aesthetics balanced by the local particularities of Tokyo opposed to Kyoto—a common trope at the time, formalized in the ritualistic opposition between two imperial images, that is, modern, masculine Tokyo and traditional, feminine Kyoto— Kafū himself does not trust the local (weather), much less the Japanese state. This distrust, if a form of paranoia, is not about manipulation and conspiracy but about managing the new and unpredictable flows of the capital, which always exceed the cognitive and affective capacities of urban dwellers. These flows combine, more so than in Katai’s near-suburb and Ōgai’s urban center, global and national flows of circulation and exchange in an ongoing process of creative destruction that always threatens to destroy its beautiful landscapes. In one of the endings of The River Sumida discussed at the end of this chapter, the Sumida overflows, floods its banks, and threatens to carry away its precarious shelters. As Sian Ngai explains, paranoia is about “whether writing comes from inside or outside its author”; in contrast to modernist shock, paranoia is “a more ambient aesthetic”7 engaging the smallness of urban subjects in their urban environment—the main characteristic of Kon Wajirō’s theory of urban ecologies, as we will see in the following chapters. Paranoia generates a pathic subject who knows they cannot rely on simple oppositions—inside/outside,

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private/public—to orient and contain planetary urban flows. The paranoid subject knows that it is too small to grasp the whole reality of its planetary situation, and that its agency is first limited to the adoption of a particular attitude; this in turn allows for an ethico-aesthetic appreciation of these flows and the perspectival movement between urban surfaces that temporarily compose a beautiful landscape to permit a dwelling experience. This is not the modernist view from the window but the view from a bridge, suspended between water and sky. This is about unevenness again, but unevenness in the plebeian and littoral city, always leaking and on the brink of destruction. This explains partly why, although Tokyo is never reduced to the function of an imperial capital as a showcase for Japan, the West, and Asia, Kafū calls in the end for the preservation of national beautiful landscapes, knowing they will eventually be carried away by the flows of history. The national matters for Kafū. Love for the country (aikokushugi) is invoked in the last essay of Fair-Weather Clogs entitled “Setting Sun and Mount Fuji” to argue for the preservation of local beauty (kyōdo no bi) along with a purification of the national language (kokugo no junka senren), in a celebration of the landscapes offered by the view from Mount Fuji. Paranoia becomes in this context a method for engaging with anxieties generated by planetary urbanization where the national, artificially decoupled from the state, is understood as essentially unstable, fragile, and in need of care. Like all the writers discussed in this book, Kafū is a male nationalist writer. Yet neither nationalism nor masculinity suffices to account for his ethicoaesthetic attitude and its associated everyday practice of urban modernity in Tokyo. On the one hand these categories were not yet reified, much less polarized, in the clean binaries we work with today. This allowed for more play, for more spacing between surfaces, which explains both the interest in modernist theories of shock and the weakness of shock theories to account for the actual everyday experiences of early twentieth-century urbanites. On the other hand, Kafū’s paranoia is really about repair. For it is concerned with spacing urban flows by mobilizing a spatiotemporal perspectivalism, between modern facades and back alleys, Edo maps, and modern urban planning, flows that always leak and threaten to overflow. In other words, this is not about deconstructing and unveiling the exploitation and abuse of the people by the capitalist and imperialist state. That is a given. For this reason, a hermeneutics of suspicion, to quote Eve Sedgwick, cannot allow us to understand, much less to engage with this paranoia that is really about the smallness and fragility of the urban dweller in urban modernity.8 This fragility always escapes from the threefold rhythms of hubris, resentment, and complacency that today threaten to overflow our planetary time.9

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The method is paranoid heteropia, the umbrella/fair-weather clog/Edo map assemblage, a mobile and portable dwelling form that conjugates water flows into beautiful landscapes, which can become a stage for pleasurable dwelling experiences. The narrator of Fair-Weather Clogs claims not to act out of a sense of social duty or responsibility, and in a sense, it is an almost pure aesthetic drive that moves him through Tokyo. Yet this drive implies a degree of responsibility to the situation generated by those cartographic practices, to the dwelling places through which the urban subject is made to pass. As such, it is not a drive: it is an expressive movement. At the same time, Kafū radicalizes the risshin shusse ideology of the middle-class, selfmade man sponsored by the modern Japanese state10 by claiming a complete disengagement from contemporary social politics. Although the Tokyo stroller shares a family resemblance with the Parisian one, both dwelling in national urban centers, the narrator stresses the difference between French and Japanese urban strollers. For although the actual behavior (kōi) and affective movement (kangai) look similar in both cases, the everyday environment (kyōgū) is not.11The difference between two practices of urban space is articulated in national terms, as a different relation with a local milieu. The emphasis on the local (which is why the universal concept of flâneur is not appropriate here), the critical distance from “the fake Western-style civilization of modern Japan,” and the desire for the popular life of Shitamachi12 articulate in FairWeather Clogs a locally embedded and thus singular practice of urban space.13 And here, the abstraction of urban movement from the concerns of the state and capitalist circulation becomes a way to recover a sense of local places, precisely because they reopen onto the urban planetary. Published in 1915, these short essays in the zuihitsu genre (essayist form of writing) present an interesting tension between Kafū’s political criticism of Japanese modernity in his early works and his search for traces of Edo in Taishō Tokyo. In spring 1916, Kafū retired from both his position as instructor at Keiō Gijuku (later Keiō University) and editor at Mita Bungaku, and after the construction of the Danchōtei (Dyspepsia House) in the garden of his family home in Okubo, he completely retired from contemporary life. Fair-Weather Clogs thus marks a turning point that brings into productive tension a series of oppositions: private and public, Edo and Tokyo, the West and Japan, Meiji Tokyo and Taishō back alleys, modern bridges and boats, land and water, light and darkness. The cartographic practice that structures Fair-Weather Clogs not only marks a shift in the work of an individual writer but also resonates with other contemporary texts similarly concerned with exploring the possibilities of experience opened by the urban planetary while resisting the fall into nostalgia and national consumerism. Kafū’s mapping

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of Tokyo operates in contrast with modern mappings of the capital (e.g., the military maps and tourist maps discussed in chapter 2). And it is these tensions that allow for the emergence of beautiful dwelling places for an urban subject in transit between Tokyo and Edo. Fair-Weather Clogs is well known for its alternative mapping of Tokyo, localizing the dwelling places of urban subjects in the interstitial spaces of Tokyo, its abandoned temples and mansions, its networks of rivers and canals, back alleys, urban slopes, and vacant lots, valorized for their quality of movement disconnected from any utilitarian ideology. This typology of urban places realized by an eccentric character strolling in the marginal and interstitial spaces of the Japanese capital seems to validate the conventional figure of Nagai Kafū as a modern dandy, safely removed from the inconveniences of modern life and confining himself within the decadent aesthetic of the demi-monde. As the story goes, Kafū, upon returning from the United States and France in 1908, became an important figure of the bundan (literary coterie) as part of the Keiō University Mita Bungaku antinaturalist and eclectic group of writers. After the High Treason Incident, he retired from public life to live the life of “an old-style dandy, [. . .] to collect Ukiyo-e prints, [. . .] to learn shamisen.” Kafū’s work is thus often read as a reaction against the conditions of modernity in terms of an experience of loss, in this case both a loss of faith in modern political life and the disappearance of Edo popular life and aesthetics. In short, Kafū would be one of those “modernists against modernity” captured by the ideology of the lost home. The eponymous first essay of the collection entitled simply FairWeather Clogs seems to confirm this reading, made famous by the Japanese literary scholar Edward Seidensticker, concluding as it does by affirming the impossibility of adapting to the modern world: “As long as, passing by the back streets [of Tokyo], I am moved by the sound of the shamisen played by a young girl, I probably won’t be able to entirely welcome the new ways of the world.”14 The urban figure let loose in Fair-Weather Clogs, however modernist it may be, is in no easy sense oriented by a nostalgic desire for the lost past of Edo. Nor is he simply a Japanese version of the urban flâneur.15 While it is important to stress the commonality of urban experiences across national borders and the East/West divide, the reappropriation of the figure of the flâneur in Japanese studies has too often become an uncritical celebration of local urban practices as against the imposition of Western modernity,16 an argument that ends up in the classic aporia of postcolonial studies, caught between orientalism and nationalism in the trauma of lost identity. In the specific case of Fair-Weather Clogs, Kafū’s stroller and Benjamin’s flâneur

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present clear differences in their engagement with urban space. In both cases, it is a question of positively engaging with a disorienting movement of urbanization and learning how to dwell in transit. However, Kafū’s stroller is not posed against urban masses or even urban types: masses are here replaced by different qualities of movements in relation to a local milieu. Second, while the flâneur is mobilized by Benjamin to recover alternative historical possibilities hidden in the ruins of the present, Kafū’s urban subject shows no preference for the past or past things. What matters first is to find a method that allows one to engage with this evanescent present and compose, if only for an instant, a beautiful view. This reading of Fair-Weather Clogs thus departs both from Edward Seidensticker’s conventional understanding of Kafū as an esthete withdrawn from the world and nostalgic for Edo popular culture and also from Isoda Kōichi’s characterization of Kafū’s life as “a radical individualism.”17 Rather, I build on Steven Snyder’s reading of Kafū as a modernist writer and in particular his understanding of the function of the urban in Kafū’s writings: “The city in Kafū’s fiction, in particular, becomes a stage for the presentation of a developing aesthetic vision, a vision that serves as a barometer in reverse of Japan’s cultural climate during the first half of the twentieth century.”18 By way of this detour through the backstreets and waterways of the Japanese capital, Kafū’s urban stroller finds a way to engage generatively with the disorienting movement of planetary urbanization and its ongoing sense of loss. In particular, Fair-Weather Clogs displaces the modern opposition between the private space of the domus and the public space of exchange by generating an alternative urban cartography rooted in a network of roads, canals, and place names associated with the life of the lower classes, that is, the common and poor people of modern Tokyo. Designated as saimin (poor people) or heimin (common people), this popular class becomes for Kafū the repository of an alternative everyday life still in touch with Edo and allowing him to shine another light onto the façades of Meiji civilization—one that first acknowledges the uneven temporalities of urban modernity. Dwelling in urban space becomes then a question of finding a harmonious relation with a local milieu defined by a threefold tension: a unique Japanese sense of beautiful landscapes (nihon koyū no fūkeibi)19 opposed to Westernstyle red brick buildings; a local sense of aesthetics, in which Edo-Tokyo, having no exceptional sites in the vein of Ōsaka or Kyoto, is characterized by a unique quality of ordinariness; and the planetary movement of urban space, denoted by Kafū’s placing Tokyo on the same plane as Paris, New York, and London. However, no mention being made of other Asian cities, this is still a global mode of the urban planetary that Kafū encounters exclusively in Tokyo.

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Tokyo thus becomes in Fair-Weather Clogs a space of experiences defined by the convergence and intersection of the three scales of local, national, and global, and the aesthetic judgment of urban landscapes is based on the qualitative appreciation of a hybrid movement of flows in place for a subject in transit. This ethico-aesthetic attitude is grounded in an observational subject, a bystander turning into a voyant. The voyant is a pathic subject, which is why attitude is prior to action and production. The search for beautiful dwelling places consists in adopting an attitude, which is a perspective that makes visible locally the flows of the emerging urban planetary. I begin with a discussion of the ways Fair-Weather Clogs generates its urban subject by displacing the national domus and its national subject onto a mobile paranoid heterotopia. Minimally defined by the assemblage of fair-weather clogs, an umbrella, and a late Edo map, the Tokyo stroller is launched onto a quest for beautiful landscapes in a mobile dwelling experience. Focusing my analysis on the introductory essay “Fair-Weather Clogs,” the fourth essay on maps, and the sixth essay on waters, I show how heterotopia becomes a cartographic method for exploring safely—I return to the issue of danger and safety in the concluding part of this chapter—the new urban everyday and composing Tokyo as a beautiful dwelling territory. In conclusion, I discuss the relation between heterotopia as method and fictional narrative in the case of the novella The River Sumida and its island refuges bridging across urban flows of the Japanese capital.

The Tokyo Stroller The full title of Kafū’s collection of urban essays is Fair-Weather Clogs or a Record of Strolling in Tokyo (Hiyorigeta ichimei Tōkyō sansakuki). The main character is Watashi (I), a self-proclaimed eccentric character: “I am unusually tall [like Kafū himself], and I am distinguished by the fact that I always carry an umbrella and wear hiyorigeta.”20 The hiyorigeta, Japanese-style footwear with double high heels designed for good weather, reinforces the distance from ordinary people’s life of this strange figure now abstracted from the ground of normal urban everyday life. Fair-Weather Clogs places the narrator-subject of the text in a state of suspension, not completely isolated, not completely part of the life of ordinary urbanites. Suspended, he is already in transit, spatially and temporally. Although wearing fair-weather clogs, the narrator always carries an umbrella with him, just in case, as “[he] cannot trust this Tokyo weather [which is] very humid all year long.” “The pattern of the Tokyo sky can change easily,”21 and while this can allow for romantic encounters in the world of theater, one can never be prepared enough.

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The Tokyo stroller is defined by his unexpected accoutrement, the simultaneous presence of good and bad weather articles of consumption on the same individual body, marking both the continuous emergence of the new in urban space and naturalizing this movement as a characteristic of the local milieu of Tokyo. Rather than the mutually exclusive use value of each article (use one or the other depending on the weather, following the logic of commodity exchange), it is here their everyday copresence that is stressed as defining a singular practice of urban space, which subverts the dual logic of functional rationality and commodity fetishism. The hiyorigeta and the umbrella compose a mobile dwelling form that slows down the repetitive and mechanical flow of urban life, emblematized by the modern transport network, by actualizing in a material form and practice the essentially unpredictable nature of modern urban space as a space of experiences. Kafū thus challenges the fantasy of modern life, the claim that a commodity can be exchanged for any other commodity via the mediation of money and at the same time is endowed of a unique use value that can be appropriated to express the consumer’s desires. Kafū’s urban stroller is an urban monad, distinguished from other monads by a singular practice of a space of flow and change. This quality of change always in tension with the new is naturalized by a multilayered process of localization in both the analogy with the weather conditions of Tokyo and the remembering of childhood that opens the first essay. As the narrator “Watashi” (I) recalls, a move from the Koishikawa district to Kōjimachi opens access to new territories of exploration, starting with a spectacular panoramic view of Tokyo from the top of a tree in the Kōjimachi-Yotsuya area.22 But soon the new becomes boring, and a timely return to Koishikawa prompts a renewed interest—this time in the popular area of Shitamachi. This retrospective narrative of Kafū’s childhood functions by associating urban places with an individual narrative of exploration (rather than growing up), and walking the city becomes a remembrance of the narrator’s life who can now declare, “Today, a walk in Tokyo is for me nothing else but following the traces of my past life from the day I was born.”23 Walking the city becomes the making of an individual narrative in the form of a spatial itinerary—or so the narrator says: the claim is undone, as soon as it is made, by the very dissemination of individual memories at the surface of the Tokyo map. The expression employed to express the subject of this experience is not “watashi ni totte,” literally “for me,” but “watashi no mi ni totte,” “for my body,” a rather unusual expression that makes perfect sense in this context, where it is not so much the individual self that is at stake but rather its social existence as a moving body in transit in a space of urban flows.24 The collection

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of essays is therefore never structured in the form of an individual narrative of growing up but rather functions as a dynamic typology of urban space, a series of urban situations that draw an alternative cartography of modern Tokyo. What sounds at first like a conventional claim for the retrospective creation of a linear narrative framed by the two moments of birth and death is thus immediately displaced onto a fragmented nonlinear movement, a topological narrative rhythmed by the appearance and disappearance of urban centers of experience. Interestingly, this shift is marked by the access to a panoramic view of Tokyo as a movement of transgression: the child playfully disregards the Law of the state-father materialized in the sign of interdiction at the foot of the tree, “Do Not Climb.” And it is after getting access to a spectacular view of Tokyo (zekkei), a total image of the city at the junction of the two areas of Shitamachi and Yamanote, that the narrator returning to Koishikawa starts his journey in urban space. In other words, it is the access to a total view that disrupts the narrative of functional development as well as the value of the originary dwelling place of Koishikawa. In a now classic text, Tokyo as an Idea: Notes on Modern Literature History (1978),25 the literary scholar Isoda Kōichi (1931–1987) reads Tokyo in terms of a double sociolinguistic structure. On one hand, Tokyo is the center of the modern standard Japanese (hyōjungo), aligned with the imperial order, functionality, and universal modernity. On the other hand, it is a local place with its own regional dialect, Tokyo hōgen, and its own population. This double structure is symbolized by the opposition between Yamanote and Shitamachi. The new urban middle class emerged in the Yamanote area and in particular the Western suburb, while Shitamachi remained associated with a popular culture inherited from Edo. The opposition is social (middle class and lower classes), historical (Tokyo and Edo), and topographic (high city and low city). And for Isoda Kōichi, it is an unequal relation of power: the regional dialect of Tokyo is continuously colonized by standard Japanese. This tension between Tokyo as national center and Tokyo as regional periphery is thus a complex one. If standard Japanese is based on Tokyo dialect, it is adopted and imposed by a population external to Tokyo, the Satchō clique (satchō hanbatsu) constituting the new Meiji government after 1868, and then the continuous flow of migrants coming from the country for work, study, and tourism.26 Scholars of modern Japanese literature have constantly emphasized Kafū’s aestheticism, either to celebrate the quality of his writing or to denounce his lack of engagement with actual reality. Makoto Ueda, for example, defines Kafū’s aesthetics as “sorrowful beauty” and emphasizes Kafū’s attitude as an observer describing reality instead of trying to change it. Kafū’s realism

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would thus be rooted into the pathos of life, an imitation of nature based on the selection of meaningful fragments for presenting “the truths about life.” Yet as Ueda stresses, this “sorrowful beauty” is not rooted in a Buddhist attitude, the “pathos” of things, but rather in a search for pleasures in the present.27 What is valued in Fair-Weather Clogs is the experience of urban places, at the very moment at which they are emerging and disappearing. This is opposed to the national high culture sanctioned by the state in official guides to the city, which present a form of museumification of the past good only for putting chains around buildings and erecting “do not . . .” signs (naninani bekarazu). The beautiful resides in the possibility of an everyday encounter with ordinary places as they are already disappearing. Aesthetics implies ethics, a singular relation to a historical milieu. It is a matter of a local attachment to a place of birth, Edo, as it is disappearing in its opening to a global and planetary urban space. “As such,” Watashi writes, “my tramp is not for praising this new city that is Tokyo and arguing about its aesthetic value, nor is it a passionate search for the historical traces of Edo the old capital.”28 It is instead an engagement with the present condition of life of urban dwellers precisely by playing on the geohistorical tension between Edo and Tokyo. As the narrator tells us, Tokyo temple eaves are not comparable to those of the old imperial capitals of Kyoto and Nara.29 Yet this urban landscape does have a special interest (kyōshu) for one who was born there. Aesthetic appreciation of Tokyo relies on a claimed character of ordinariness, the nonexceptional quality of everyday places of experience, and would thus be only accessible to Tokyo dwellers, born and raised in Tokyo. We find the same argument in essay no. 7, on the back alleys (roji) of Tokyo: “In other words, back-alleys really only exist for and are known by its simple folk.”30 This “simple folk” is designated by the word heimin (commoner) and would correspond to the lower classes who, having always lived in the roji, are still in touch with the past of Edo and know it better than Tokyo governmental officials. But Kafū’s urban subject is never identified with the lower classes populating the roji. In fact, the only import of the alternative mapping of Tokyo realized by Fair-Weather Clogs is the contrast it generates with the national space of circulation centered on the modern capital of Japan and linked to other urban places of the West such as New York, London, and of course Paris. This programmatic and playful practice of urban space thus relies on a series of binary oppositions set up from the opening pages of the book, between Edo and Tokyo, popular and official, the West and Japan, Tokyo and Kyoto, and most importantly for our discussion, ordinary and exceptional. Nothing distinguishes any-place-whatever in Tokyo, and

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precisely this ordinary quality of urban places drives the attention of the narrator. He is a modern urbanite whose cartographic practice of Tokyo articulates a leap between the ordinary and the singular. In Kafū’s words, the quest for the beautiful “makes use of an irrational method to generate somewhat interesting places.”31 This state of suspension and in-betweenness artificially produced by a unique technological assemblage becomes here a question of weather, that is, of a relation to a local geographical milieu. In a short essay on Fair-weather Clogs, Isoda Kōichi remarks that this proclaimed distrust for Tokyo weather might well have to do with the new technology of weather forecasting rather than the actual geography of Tokyo. National weather forecasting officially started in Japan on June 1, 1884, one year after the establishment of the Tokyo Meteorological Agency, and national weather forecasts were proclaimed in the Tokyo police stations three times a day. This technology of weather forecasting relates closely to the development of modern surveys and mapmaking in synchronization with the world of nation-states32—in short, the establishment of what Michel Foucault called biopolitics, which, in combination with modern disciplinary practices, attempt to capture and bind the urban subject to the national domus. Weather forecasting is about policing the milieu and managing the future. This could be just a wild guess Isoda makes here, which he acknowledges immediately,33 but he points to a key element of this essay collection: their fundamental opposition to a utilitarian relation with the urban milieu and atmospheres and their resistance to the production of abstract space according to the global logics of state and capital. Technology in opposition to nature is not the problem here, for it is technology that grounds the ethico-aesthetic attitude of the urban dweller found in Fair-Weather Clogs. Nor is it in fact modernity as such. The prologue to the book edition is clear about the ironic displacement at work in this text: this book is an illegitimate appropriation of essays for the sake of publication. The word used to describe the process of editing is kaizan, which literally means the unacknowledged appropriation and falsification of a work by someone else.34 Each essay is written in a reflexive and ironic tone that should alert us immediately to the complexity of Kafū’s desire for Edo, Japanese aesthetics, and the low classes of Edo endangered by urbanization and technological development. The prologue could still be read as a framing device for presenting what are now literally historical documents, traces of the past: “Having clarified the date of each original essay, I believe that by the time this book comes out into the world not a few of the urban views recorded here will have changed without leaving a trace.”35 Isoda Kōichi, however, stresses

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that Kafū was not a nostalgic. As he explains, for Kafū and sympathetic readers, “it is actually all the better that traces of old famous places have disappeared, for they allow one to taste this sad quality of impermanence.”36 The narrator of Fair-Weather Clogs is not so much interested in the actual traces of the past as in the quality of experience attached to their movement of (dis-)appearance, as they are carried away by the movement of planetary urbanization. It is this quality of transience that matters here, the acceleration of change, innovation, and decay on the one hand and on the other the desire for a sense of ground and direction it tends to generate in reaction. This too often becomes for the bourgeois subject a mix of alienation, nostalgia, and hope, always sidestepping the actual experience that makes urban places dwelling places, the movement that opens them to their planetary becomings, in their (dis-)appearance. Irony however playfully displaces this bourgeois alienated subject onto another playground, the one of zuihitsu. Kafū’s ironic tone precludes any possibility of equating the author, writer, narrator, and “Watashi.” The zuihitsu literary genre, commonly translated as “miscellaneous essays” and usually traced back to Sei Shōnagon’s 1002 The Pillow Book, Kamo no Chōmei’s 1212 Ten Foot Square Hut, or Yoshida Kenkō’s 1330–1332 Essays in Idleness, was revived in the Bunka-Bunsei era (1804–1830) and again in the Taishō era. Contemporary understandings of the zuihitsu genre emphasize its biographical character, combining both a contemplative and critical relation to the everyday situation of the writer, as well as its formlessness and seriality, undermining at the same time any easy claim to the biographical. Rachel DiNitto argues that the modern zuihitsu genre emerging in pre-World War II Japanese urban culture was tied “to the expansion of the prewar mass-media and a new urban middle-class readership for this print culture” and “encompassed a wide variety of writing styles and materials [from] travelogues and semi-fictional stories to critical reviews and racy literati gossip.”37 The ambiguity of definition and heterogeneity of the zuihitsu genre is precisely what allowed Kafū and others to articulate another urban subject. Fair-Weather Clogs’s narrator Watashi (the neutral “I”) is an alternative literary persona of Kafū the scribbler (Kafū Shōshi), the pen name adopted here by Nagai Kafū, alias Nagai Sōkichi (his official name). Watashi accordingly shares a family resemblance with other Kafū literary figures, such as the narrator of A Strange Tale from the East of the River, who declares with satisfaction, “I had for some years been in the habit of carrying an umbrella whenever I left home; and, however beautiful a day it might be, this was the rainy season. I was therefore not unprepared.”38 In this later novel, this almost excessive preparation is what allows for an unexpected encounter with a young geisha in the eastern licensed quarter of Tamanoi in Honjo, east of the river

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Sumida. We find in this novel the same kind of perspectivalism we have seen in Fair-Weather Clogs, whereby an a priori process of abstraction generates the possibility for encountering beautiful urban landscapes. Modernist irony functions here as a way to open a movement between contrasting mappings of space for new dwelling experiences. Fair-Weather Clogs is thus an interesting attempt at remapping Tokyo as a local site of urban experience, where an alternative cartography coexists with and continuously subverts the state mapping of the capital turned into a national space of circulation. These essays generate a singular dwelling territory in the search for beautiful landscapes of Tokyo. Playing on the tension between the mapping and cartographic impulses (respectively, the ordering and the expression of urban experiences), this text displaces the modern opposition of (modern) Tokyo and (traditional) Edo onto a question of perspectivalism where Edo, identified with Shitamachi and the popular, participates in a cartographic space that infiltrates itself in-between the mappings of the national state.39 At first an almost chauvinist claim for the beauty of one’s place of birth, the contrast between modern Tokyo and its back alleys, temples, and waters generates a cartography of movement, a space of difference from which can emerge beautiful landscapes of dwelling. In other words, Kafū is interested into the turning of place allowed by this perspectivalism, a turning that is closer to the everyday he was experiencing. For this reason, this is not a matter of preserving a local sociohistorical space colonized by the new totalizing and homogenizing national state, nor of defining the city in opposition to the country. Firstly, Kafū never condemns Western modernity as such. After his return from America and France in 1909, he reserves his acerb criticism for the nature of Japanese modern civilization, presented as a pale and fake imitation of the Western one: a classical critique, perhaps, but one that cannot simply be subsumed under the names of nostalgia or tradition. Kafū’s valorization of the popular culture of Tokyo Shitamachi in opposition to the modern streets of Ginza differs from other leftist critiques, for example, of the violent remapping of Paris, realized by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire, in the name of an ideology of circulation of goods and people.40 Shitamachi already in its initial definition refers more to an alternative cultural mapping of Tokyo than to a fixed topography. It is an internal periphery to the façades of Japanese urban modernity and, in Kafū’s text, the only places from which one can find the beautiful of Tokyo. The expression “from which” I use here to render Kafū’s sense of the urban beautiful implies that it is first a question of perspective before being about a geographical actual: the beautiful is the effect of a practice, it is a composition and a performance.

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Heterotopia as Method After the introductory essay on fair-weather clogs and two others on inshi (old popular shrines located in peripheral areas and back alleys in opposition to official shrines)41 and local trees, next comes an elaborate essay on maps and the practical value of Edo maps for navigating modern Tokyo. Hiyorigeta’s urban stroller, in addition to his umbrella and fair-weather clogs, always carries on him an edokirizu (literally, cut maps of Edo), in particular edokirizu from the late Edo era characterized by their innovative mapping of the city by partitioning its space into a series of smaller areas.42 It is interesting that this essay comes after childhood reminiscences, reflections on popular sites of cult, and the definition of an urban aesthetics rooted in a local nature, each seemingly constituting different figures of a local and natural home. However, those local places of experience are valued as such only in opposition to and as always already displaced by a modern Japanese space of circulation and exchange. Childhood, local popular beliefs, and nature are only valued as they are disappearing, more precisely because they are disappearing in the wake of modern urban developments, in particular the Tokyo Urban Improvement Works (shiku kaisei jigyō) launched by the Japanese government in the name of “Civilization and Enlightenment” and subscribing to a functional logic of circulation, hygiene, and control. Early Meiji urban planning can be read in terms of the establishment of modern abstract space, defined by Henri Lefebvre as homogeneous, hierarchized, and fragmented.43 In a context of semi-colonization (due to the unequal treaties) and imperialism dominated by Western nation-states, the transformation of Edo into the capital of a modern nation-state was of central concern to the new Meiji government.44 The problem was to open a military spatial structure (Edo as capital of a military regime) to the free circulation of goods and people while allowing for control of the new national population. The main issue addressed by the shikukaisei was therefore threefold: control of the population, particularly segregation and separation of the rich from the poor (hinpu sumiwake), as advocated by Tokyo governor Matsuda Michiyuki (1839–1882); the nature of the central area of Tokyo, whether it be political and monumental in the manner of Berlin or Paris, or economic, centered on an international harbor (in Tsukiji) or a business center (in Kabutochō), or a combination; and lastly, development of modern infrastructures (transportation, hygiene and waterworks, fire prevention). For reasons both political (most notably the initial failure to revise the unequal treaties) and budgetary, the infrastructure development plan of Governor Yoshikawa Akimasa (1841–1920) was adopted, leading to three series of Tokyo Urban

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Improvement Works from 1888 to 1918, respectively, works on waterways, urban railways, and the sewer system.45 The alternative mapping of Tokyo found in Fair-Weather Clogs is precisely associated with those areas most directly affected by the Tokyo Urban Improvements Works, that is, the water system and the labyrinth of small streets in the back alleys of modern Tokyo, areas that become in Kafū’s work identified with a popular Shitamachi.46 Here, it is problematized as a question of movement, that is, the possibility of a strolling in Tokyo that is not based on the double principle of efficiency and speed as emblematized by the railway: “To press one’s way onto the municipal train, one needs at each missed connection the recklessness to, without consideration for attitude nor decency, push people aside and frantically hop onto the next train.”47 Rather than using the train as the fastest way to circulate in the capital, our narrator, whose childhood did not know the train, prefers a stroll in the old streets of Tokyo that survived the destructions of the Tokyo Improvement Works. Rather than the train, Watashi uses old maps. The fourth essay entitled “Maps” presents this original cartographic practice that articulates a perspectival movement between official and popular mappings of the capital—and thus not identified with the living space of the popular classes as such. When I walk the city dragging my fair-weather clogs and using my umbrella as a cane, I always carry on me those portable Kaei editions of Edo maps. Actually this is not because I hate contemporary lithographic prints of Tokyo maps or yearn particularly for old woodblock print maps. Dragging along my fair-weather clogs as I am walking today’s streets [of Tokyo], as I walk and juxtapose today’s maps with maps of old I can effortlessly compare and see right in front of my eyes the contrast between old Edo and today’s Tokyo.48

What is at stake here is the possibility of relating the present to the past as Watashi passes through the streets of Tokyo, that is, of the possibility of experiencing two distinct historical moments in a single and singular everyday experience. What is it that allows Watashi to bring those two historical moments into the same plane to compare and contrast them, to dwell between them, in transit? What is this relation between Tokyo and Edo? What we find here is obviously not an attempt at reducing Tokyo to Edo and finding there a common cultural ground that would subsume both urban worlds, as in too many of the Edo-Tokyo studies. Nor is it really an attempt to find the remains of Edo in the midst of modern Tokyo and salvage them for the good of the Japanese urban dweller. Again, what is at stake is the possibility of seeing together Tokyo and Edo as distinct historical places in a singular moment where both temporalities can coexist. Here, rather than a

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stereoscope as in Mori Ōgai’s novel Wild Goose, which would bring us back to the modern alienated subject, it is another technological device, the map, that, in combination with the umbrella-hiyorigeta assemblage, opens onto an urban landscape of movement. Here, Kafū does not refer to Edo as such (he does in other texts). And when he does, it is not as the “place of utter difference” that it becomes in the Taishō revival of Edo, “offer[ing] a cultural space, timeless and unchanging, where the spirit abraded by the masses and modish modernism could return to be ‘refreshed’ and re-Japanned.”49 Rather, Edo is mobilized by Kafū to express and figure the evanescent quality of dwelling experiences in modern Tokyo. By introducing an alternative mapping of the capital, the Kaei editions of Edo maps published between 1848 and 1854, the urban stroller is able to engage with a space of historical change.50 Thomas Looser explains that the Kaei era started in 1848, at a time when “the Shogunate was increasingly unable to manipulate and control the political geography of the state.”51 As peasant riots and political crisis succeeded one another, the pressure of external Western countries victorious against China in the Nanking War further precipitated the political disintegration of Tokugawa Japan. The proclamation of a new era, Kaei or “the Celebration of Eternity,” was one of the last attempts to reground the Tokugawa order into the eternity of an almost mythical social order as exemplified in the Noh performance that immediately preceded the declaration of the new era. In this respect, the appeal of the late Edo era in modern Japan directly relates to this image of an eternal order on the brink of collapse. This can be understood in light of Derrida’s grounding of historicity into the movement of the negative. In the essay “Force et signification,” he argues that it “is during the epochs of historical dislocation, when we are expelled from the site, that this structuralist passion, which is simultaneously a frenzy of experimentation and a proliferation of mechanisms, develops for itself.”52 Yet in this text, Kafū turns negativity into the ongoing generation of singular situations, rather than a closed structure as in postwar structuralism and even Derridean deconstruction. And Kafū does not always refer to the late Edo era as in Fair-Weather Clogs. As William J. Tyler remarks, it is rather the Tenmei era (1781–1789) that later becomes “the site of origination for the modernist impulse” for Kafū. This movement from mid-Edo to late Edo, early or late Meiji are each time an attempt at touching an originary moment of modernity similar in this respect to Benjamin’s prehistory of modernity. The Edo maps mentioned in Fair-Weather Clogs were published in a nearcataclysmic time as commercial alternatives to other types of gazetteers and maps. Edo maps are characterized by a tension between official maps and

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popular maps, a tension that evolved in line with the history of the city itself. The former aim at social control and therefore rely on precise and accurate surveys, the most famous and important example being the maps produced by the Shogunate in the aftermath of the 1657 Great Meireki Fire that destroyed nearly two-thirds of Edo, the Five maps from the Kanbun era (1661–1673) (Kanbun go-mai zu).53 As Marcia Yonemoto shows, those maps became the ground for an explosion of commercial production of maps aimed for the most part, but not only, at the commoner population of Edo. In distinction with this official and administrative mapping, the maps of Ishikawa Ryūsen (1684–1715), one of the most representative cases of commercial mapmaking during the Edo era, privileged expression (the vernacular language of maps expressive of a local urban culture) over accuracy. He meant for his maps “to be seen, read, and used to navigate the multiple worlds—physical, political and social—in which Edo commoners lived.”54 Ishikawa’s 1689 Outline Map of Edo, Part I (Edo zukan kōmoku, kon) and its supplementary booklet locating the map in a larger and smaller scale (with additional maps of Japan and a glossary locating “experts,” merchants, and entertainers in the city itself) is both a guide for navigation in the city and city life, as well as a tactical reappropriation of the space of Edo for the elite commoner population. Edokirizu (or Edokiriezu) were the last incarnation of Edo commercial maps. In what was already a market economy with a temporality oriented in terms of future profits and fashion change, these maps innovated by breaking down the surface of Edo into a series of distinct areas (thirty on average), making on-the-spot consultation a lot easier, hence the name Edokirizu, Cut Maps of Edo.55 This reframing of urban space was directed by the logic of commercial editing and marketing and did not rely on administrative units or topographical or cultural areas. Unlike total maps of Edo (Edozenzu), these maps were portable and had first a practical value for locating and orienting a moving urbanite in the maze of Edo streets: they were way-finding tools.56 Four edition companies competed on the market of Edokirizu—Mochimojiya, Owariya, Kingodō, and Hiranoya—with clear formal and technical differences. While Mochimojiya edokirizu have a longer history, it is the latter Owariya and to a smaller degree the Kingodō maps that were the most successful in the market race and for this reason still remained widely available in the Meiji era. Fair-Weather Clogs’ edokirizu is probably an Owariya edition, given the painterly quality (kaigateki) stressed by the narrator (figure 3.1).57 Owariya edokirizu were famous for their wide use of colors (seven against five for Kingodō, the latter without red or grey) and along with their use of daimyō crests (monshō) rendered the social space of Edo immediately legible to the urban traveler. The maps were structured by the transport system (roads and

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Figure 3.1  Edokirizu Owariya—Map of Nihonbashi Southern Area. Bottom right: Eitaibashi bridge. 1860. Tokyo Metropolitan Library.

canals-rivers) and the layout of the land according to jurisdictional divisions (warriors, temples and shrines, commoners). The warrior areas constituting almost 70 percent of the total urban area and the use of monshō allowed for an easier differentiation of areas according to the main lord (daimyō) and their associated professional activities when relevant.58 If the lack of accuracy is often pointed out, these maps had the necessary precision for a practical use as way-finding tools in late Edo.59 Maps are both image and diagram, oscillating between self-referentiality and exo-referentiality in their relation to the sociohistorical real. The question then is of the mode of referentiality of the map, how self-referentiality and exo-referentiality are brought together in cartographic practices, the modern imperative of geometric accuracy being only one possible option. Edokirizu are grounded in the Tokugawa order. The system might well be collapsing in part due to the development of a market economy and its subversive

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effect on the social structure, the juridical system of land tenure remained the ground for mapping the social reality of Edo. Kaei Edokirizu present us with a heterogeneous urban space entirely different from the homogeneous space of our modern maps, yet unified by a distinct social form, Tokugawa Japan.60 In Fair-Weather Clogs, these Kaei maps are relocated within Japanese modernity and Tokyo. As artifacts, Kaei Edokirizu come at the end of an era and the total image of Edo they present is already opening toward modern abstract space by naturalizing the social order of the Tokugawa as an ahistorical ground of movement that has no other value but to allow for localization and smooth navigation in the city. In other words, in those maps the order of the Tokugawa is reduced to a natural land structure that passes into Tokyo despite the radical transformations of Meiji. Edo becomes a natural landscape structured by roads, canals, and place names, an underlying grid that if oriented toward the production of urban space as abstract space also offers other possibilities. As these maps keep referring to a sociohistorical space outside of modernity, they become heterotopic spaces. The urban landscape that emerges from Fair-Weather Clogs’s cartographic practice is a heterotopia—and a paranoid one. Michel Foucault defined heterotopia in opposition to a construction of the social in terms of an individual narrative: “We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.”61 A heterotopia is “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”62 Something similar happens here: the Kaei Edokirizu point at and reduce the space of Edo to a singular land pattern, a structure of flow that is posed in difference with the modern public space of exchange of Tokyo and the modern maps produced by the Meiji government. Edo maps are, for Watashi, ezu, literally “picture-diagrams,” valued for their quality of expression. In contrast with modern maps of Tokyo, Watashi argues, we should understand that the inaccuracy of Edo maps (fuseikaku) comes from their privileging a more intuitive and impressionistic approach to the world,63 for example, by picturing Ueno cherry trees or the faraway Mount Tsukuba on the map itself. Edokirizu’s inaccuracy emphasizes their endo-referential diagrammatic expressivity. The separation of the endo-referential and the exo-referential dimensions of the map is a characteristic of modern maps that allows for the illusion of transparency of modern abstract space, which grounds the aporia of the modern subject. The valorization of edokirizu in Fair-Weather Clogs is a reaction against this modern form of cartography and the alienated subject it

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reproduces. Edo maps are reappropriated via a double process of abstraction, historical and aesthetic: first, Edo is abstracted from the sociohistorical reality of Tokugawa Japan and reduced to an ahistorical natural landscape of movement, and then the expressive quality of Edo maps is isolated and emphasized over the utilitarianism of modern maps: “Tokyo maps are like geometrical drawings and Edo maps are like figures.”64 Those Tokyo maps are the maps produced by the Department of Terrestrial Survey (Rikuchi Sokuryō-bu) established in 1888. They follow modern scientific standards of accuracy and precision, in direct relation with the strategic needs of a young and already imperialist nation-state. Like Youth, Fair-Weather Clogs problematizes the imagination of a national territory as homogeneous and in synchronicity with a global world of nation-states in terms of everyday experiences. “There are probably no more precisely accurate maps of Tokyo than the maps of the Department of Terrestrial Survey. But when I look at them, no interest springs up, and I cannot even imagine anything about the landscape.”65 The modern map claims to have a mimetic relation with reality, but the illusion of transparency allowed by scientific standards of accuracy is premised on the separation of the geometric space of the map from the space of everyday life, something Henri Lefebvre understands as the colonization of spaces of representation, the urban everyday, by representations of space, here the space of modern maps. Watashi thus values Edokirizu for their expressive quality. However, there is nothing essential about the Edokirizu that in and of itself would make such an expressivity more central than other forms of cartography. An argument that often comes up to support such claims is a closer relation of Edokirizu to an everyday space of practice, a topological space centered on the human body and grounded in a singular sociohistorical reality. For example, Edo maps would have no fixed orientation, although the West is often placed at the top, pointing at the direction of the Emperor in Kyoto.66 The choice of cardinal orientations, if arbitrary, would reflect a clear order of value and have social meaning, as opposed to the claim for neutrality of modern maps that hardly dissimulate the essentially imperialist orientation of Enlightenment ideals. As if the Tokugawa order were not as well a question of social control and state power, relying on a different play between transparency and opacity. Edokirizu constitute another form of totalizing mapping, and they become valued for their expressive quality only when contrasted with modern maps. By opening an alternative landscape of dwelling experiences between Edo and Tokyo, Kafū’s cartographic practice is in effect subversive of the drive toward the erection of abstract space that characterizes Tokyo’s modern urban planning, both the mulberry tree policy discussed in the previous chapter

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and the Tokyo Urban Improvement Works. By the end of the essay on maps, both Edo and Tokyo maps are brought together in a discussion of early Meiji Tokyo picture maps (Tōkyō-ezu). Tōkyō-ezu become an allegory of Japanese modernity, of the creative possibilities opened up by Meiji and a modern temporality defined by hybridity and unevenness. “As I compare together Ryūhoku’s essays, Yoshiiku’s colored prints, and Kiyochika’s pictures of famous places along with Tokyo picture-maps, I often take pleasure in experiencing [sawaru, literally ‘touching’] the sensibility of this chaotic new age of Early Meiji.”67 Tokyo picture maps articulate a hybrid space, both of transition between different worlds, Edo and Tokyo, and opening onto the new reality of a planetary urban space. They constitute the ground of a perspectival space that would allow Watashi to finally make sense of and dwell in the modern age. If there is indeed a narrative movement across these eleven essays, it is one oriented by an essential dissatisfaction with the present. Fair-Weather Clogs is structured as a genealogy of the present, a quest for dwelling places of Tokyo defined in terms of an ethico-aesthetic attitude, that is, a relation between urban dwelling places and the everyday temporality of passing of the modern age that suspends, without arresting, the disorienting movement of urban space. The early Meiji era thus becomes a time of rupture replete with possibilities for a new, open, revolutionary form of the social. Associated with childhood, it is a chaotic moment, open to the emergence of the new and of a “sorrowful beauty.” “Turning one’s eyes away from Edo picture-maps and looking at Tokyo picture-maps, one is struck, as if reading there a history of the French revolution.”68 There is however one major difference for Watashi in the Japanese case. Whereas national (komuminteki) artistic (bijutsuteki) architectures of the past such as Versailles or the Louvres are preserved by the French citoyens, feudal mansions in Tokyo gradually turn into military infrastructure or are simply left in a state of ruins. We find here the theme of the treason of the national people by the new Meiji state. And in a manner similar to Benjamin, it is by establishing a connection with the early days of modernity, here the early Meiji period, that one finds a way besides the Meiji state. The method is paranoid-heterotopic because it embraces the smallness and fragility of the urban subject while rejecting the choice of abstract space and functionality. Although this implies for Kafū a relocalization inside a national landscape of movement, the network of road, canals, and place names that circulates between edokirizu and Tokyo picture maps is not entirely captured by the national, or the military—which Kafū was famously contemptuous of. Fair-Weather Clogs’s cartographic practice of Tokyo generates a different space of flow and the question now becomes one of aesthetics, of focus and

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framing, for articulating in a singular place a landscape of movement in harmony with the global age in its urban planetary becoming.

Tokyo of Waters In Fair-Weather Clogs, Kafū’s urban aesthetic of “sorrowful beauty”69 is defined as mujō (transcience), hiai (sorrow), taihoteki (degenerate), shōkoteki (old), and most importantly heibonsa (ordinariness), a vocabulary close to an aesthetic of the ruin albeit one step removed from it. For it is not here a matter of preserving monuments of a national culture, nor even of documenting traces of the past as such, but of engaging with and taking pleasure in the momentum of this quality of transience and ordinariness that defines modern urban everydayness. The keyword here is chōwa (harmony). Kafū’s recognition of the ordinary quality of Tokyo landscapes is not simply a disguise for local chauvinism but also a penetrating intuition about an emerging urban planetary. It is this ordinary, regular, and repetitive character of everyday experiences that allows for the leap in place into the singular to happen and for urban dwelling places to emerge within beautiful urban landscapes. Having presented the emergence of a mobile urban subject in terms of a unique cartographic practice and technological assemblage, it becomes now a matter of reterritorializing those everyday experiences and their subject by articulating together a series of beautiful urban landscapes. It now becomes a question of producing a territory for the pleasurable experiencing of those places, for dwelling in Tokyo. This second movement of reterritorialization comes after the liberation of the cartographic impulse opening Tokyo to a global and already planetary urban movement. The projection and dissemination of Watashi onto the urban surface of Tokyo is both a deterritorialization of the domus and a first movement of reterritorialization around a mobile center. The composite subject roaming the streets of Tokyo functions in the text as a little ritournelle, with the umbrella clad figure continuously coming back with slight variations, dragging tekuteku its hiyorigeta.70 This is akin to “a child afraid of the dark [who] sings a song to reassure herself, and in so doing establishes a stable point in the midst of chaos, a locus of order in a non-dimensional space.”71 Deleuze and Guattari define the ritournelle (refrain) as a differential rhythm, the repetition of which does not bring measure and homogeneity but repeats the singular movement of differentiation constituting a territory in its opening to other milieu (relative opening) and the whole, the planetary as absolute exteriority and difference of life. It establishes a differential regime of temporality where the consistency of a territory is not brought by a

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uniform measure of time but rather by a rhythm defined as “an autonomous configuration of difference.”72 Watashi functions here as a rhythmic character at the origin, ever repeated, of a historical movement of differentiation of urban places, centering, delineating, and opening a local territory, Tokyo, to the urban planetary. Afraid of the new age, that is, of both the reduction of everyday life to a homogeneous space of exchange (an abstract space) and of the disorienting dialectic of centrality of global urban space, Watashi attempts to draw a dwelling place by playing on the tension between the mapping and cartographic impulses, repeating the leap in place between the ordinary and the singular in terms of an aesthetic of “sorrowful beauty.”73 The second moment in the constitution of a territory is that of expressivity, in a space framed, oriented, and focused by a singular movement of affects constituting a beautiful landscape.74 The expressive movement that constitutes Tokyo as a territory is oriented by a particular scale of aesthetic value relying on three binaries: movement and stasis, life and death, nature and urban. The aesthetic judgment is thus also an ethical one. This second moment is the object of the sixth essay, entitled “Waters— and on ferryboats,” where the beautiful of Tokyo is expressed as a typology of waters. In this reading that prepares for the concluding section on the littoral city in the incomplete novel The River Sumida, I draw on recent debates in urban studies to argue that water allows us to displace modernist functional and closed mappings of the city to reopen the urban to its planetary becomings. Matthew Gandy in particular has stressed how water and changing relations to water have always been a motor of change of urban dwelling forms. More generally he argues for the necessity to look at urban space in terms of atmospheres and in particular queer ecologies.75 Gandy’s project is to recover, against the rationalization impulse of modernity—in the Japanese case Tokyo as modern capital in the age of “Civilization and Enlightenment”—another urban modernity that thrives on hybridity and ongoing processes of change, transformation, and deformation.76 This other urban modernity is nothing else but the urban planetary emerging from Kafū’s perspectival play between modernist binaries and his paranoidheterotopic method. As Gandy explains, these alternate forms of modernity allow for heterotopic alliances at the juncture of urban and nature, in urban natures where the queer urban planetary emerges as “a marker of disorder.”77 Kafū’s search for beautiful landscapes relies on an aesthetic judgment of the beautiful, a social judgment that, as Kant stresses, orders these landscapes in terms of a scale of pleasure and displeasure, suspending “disorder” to avoid being flooded by its incessant flows. In other words, the beautiful is a matter of generative tension and aesthetic appreciation for an urban subject held

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precariously together by multiple urban flows, learning to dwell in transit between water, sky, and land. The essay starts with a reference to the French historian of literature and arts Émile Magne, relocating Tokyo in a planetary narrative of urban waters. Then follows a lament for the loss of the aesthetic value of waters in modernday Tokyo, a local problem in resonance with other Western urban centers. As an attempt to think the aesthetic relation between urban Tokyo and water, I came to the conclusion that waters run from the Edo era, and are still for us today a precious factor to preserve the beauty of Tokyo. [. . .] Yet in today’s Tokyo, urban water flows have no other purpose but transport and have completely lost their legacy of aesthetic value.78

The reduction of urban space to a functional space of circulation of people and goods arrests and flattens its urban flows and their potential for pleasurable dwelling experiences. Neutralized and degraded to the purely utilitarian value of a space of exchange, Tokyo is marked by loss because it has lost its relation with water reduced to an infrastructure. However, water in the modern city is at the intersection of infrastructure and landscape. Before being associated to visual appreciation and pleasure, landscape in its original use in English referred to the Dutch Landschap, the result of human engineering.79 Water is at the intersection of infrastructure and landscape (in its present sense of a visual display for the human observer), the relation between both polarities being oriented by the gradual reduction and hiding of water as infrastructure. Although the Japanese term fūkei does not have this sense of infrastructure, it is (as explained in the previous chapter) always historical and social—and therefore infrastructural at another level. Kafū’s laments over the loss of the relation between Tokyo and water resonates with the ongoing disappearance of canals and even access to the Sumida banks in postwar Tokyo and with water as the absent landscape of modern Tokyo that grounds Maeda Ai’s argument for a shift from water to land. This argument, however, is itself hiding the more complex process at work examined in this chapter. This is clear if we compare Kafū’s text quoted earlier with Émile Magne’s text: The city that unthoughtful builders elevated in the middle of lands, deprived of the beneficial contact of the sea or the river, is destined if not to perish, to vegetate in sorrow, inactivity, and sterility. The city needs the water that speaks, walks, perpetually agitated by contradictory feelings. Water projects, in its flank, the germs necessary to its begetting of commerce and industry. It brings them life.80

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Water is here too a rich and complex metaphor for the movement of the urban as a form of life. While this does imply a sense of functionality, it is one that relies on a differential movement of affects, in connection with a sense of the natural as originary space of life. However, although Émile Magne is directly interested in the question of urban sanitization and urban beauty, Kafū rather emphasizes the hybridity of urban movements and their evanescent temporality, divorced from any sense of involvement into the production of space in architecture, urban design, or urban planning. The fate of Tokyo waters is shared by that of other urban centers, be it London, New York, or Paris. There is a global, transhistorical, and transnational connection between urban spaces as spaces of movement that face the same basic problem, namely the reduction of the differential space of experience of the urban planetary to a homogeneous space of circulation in the production of abstract space. All would have lost their aesthetic quality, and as Watashi self-critically observes, it is only the nostalgics of Edo who can still find any interest in the waters of Shinagawa in the Tokyo Bay.81 The beautiful of Tokyo waters would now reside in the comparative interest (hikakuteki kyōmi) between waterways, the movement of boats, bridges, and other urban centers. In other words, the aesthetic interest of modern Tokyo is to be found in the differential field of movement composed by its planetary water flows. Tokyo waters are then categorized in seven groups distinguished by different qualities of movement: first the bay of Shinagawa; then natural waterways such as the Sumidagawa, the Nakagawa, and the Rokugōgawa; small waterways like the Edogawa, the Kandagawa, and the Otonashigawa; natural canals running through the bustling areas of Tokyo such as Honjo, Fukagawa, Nihonbashi, Kyōbashi, Shitaya, or Asakusa; ditches and gutters (mizokawa); the Edo Castle moats; and lastly ponds like the Shinobu-ike in Ueno.82 This typology is structured by the interplay of two spatial dynamics. First, while the Tokyo waters are classified according to two opposite poles, “flowing waters and stagnant, unmoving, dead waters,” the typology itself starts with the open sea and ends with enclosed ponds, both being located outside of present urban life either in the name of a natural beauty to be preserved (the pond and also the moats) or of an anachronistic landscape. What is anachronistic in the bay of Shinagawa is the historical relation to urban modernity established by the Japanese government from late Edo, a relation still based on the idea of national seclusion and symbolized by the abandoned batteries of Odaiba.83 Second, there is no clear distinction between Shitamachi and modern areas, nor between Yamanote and Shitamachi in terms of distinct areas with identifiable limits. What matters is the degree of

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change in the intensity of this movement of waters and how it affects Tokyo dwelling experiences.84 In that respect, there is no opposition between water and land as such. The discussion of Tokyo waters relies on the same perspectival movement described in the essay on Tokyo back alleys (roji). Nor is the disappearance of Edo the problem here. On the contrary, rather than try to capture fragmented traces of Edo and immobilize them in a nostalgic image of the past, the lost domus destroyed by modern urban life, Hiyorigeta, instead generates multiple landscapes of movement where the continuous passing of things is embraced as a mark of the dynamism of Tokyo. It is a question of engaging with the historical movement of urban space, the disrupting emergence and disappearance of urban places, by generating a sense of consistency, unity, and continuity in a movement of reterritorialization of urban landscapes as beautiful dwelling places. The first example of a beautiful urban landscape given in the text is the view of the estuary of the Sumida-gawa from the Eitaibashi bridge famous in conventional imagery for its fireworks. When I cross the Eitaibashi bridge and connect with this bustling scene at the estuary of the Sumida river, I remember the life of those cargo vessels depicted in Daudet’s beautiful little volume La Nivernaise, shuttling back and forth on the Seine river. There is nothing in today’s Eitaibashi that could make me remember anymore the Tatsuya of old. And yet I do not think the Eitaibashi steel bridge unsightly at all, as for example the Azumabashi or the Ryōgokubashi, for the new steel bridge matches well with the new landscape of the estuary.85

What makes this landscape particularly beautiful is its perfect accordance (icchi) with the new temporality of modern urban space. The bustling activity of the estuary with its mix of Japanese-style cargo vessels (nibune) and Western-style sailboats (homaesen), along with the modern factories of Ishikawajima, reminds Watashi of other urban centers and in particular the Seine river in Paris. The new steel bridge of Eitaibashi is in accord with the new age so that, effortlessly, a whole and open image of Tokyo can emerge from a global landscape of movement. The view is pleasant not because of its formal characteristics but for the ethico-aesthetic attitude it allows Watashi to access, one that embraces the present planetary flows of Tokyo in resonance with other urban centers, here Paris. By contrast, “the view of the Azumabashi and Ryōgoku bridges is today so disordered it cannot gather and channel aesthetic interests in one place as at Eitaibashi.”86 The view of the upper bridges of the Sumidagawa is too disordered (fuseiton) for

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Watashi: the brutal juxtaposition of modern industrial landscapes with the traces of Edo unhinges one’s feelings of place. In other words, the modernist aesthetic of shock did not work for Kafū; it only allowed for modernist alienation and loss. The problem here is the one of modern unevenness, of the “nonsynchronous synchronisms of contemporaneity” discussed by Ernest Bloch87, that is, the unmediated and at times brutal juxtaposition of essentially different temporalities like the modern Kokugikan and the Ekōin at Ryōgoku. During the Edo era, Ryōgoku was an important area of popular entertainment already famous for its sumo matches near the Pure Land Shrine Ekōin. The Sumo Hall (Kokugikan) built in 1909 in the precinct of the shrine becomes one of the symbols of the new era, as Sumo is transformed and reified into a national tradition.88 The scene from Eitaibashi is valued for making visible and lisible (readable) the hybrid and uneven temporality of modern urban space in a focused and concentrated movement of affects presented to a distant observer suspended between water and land. Beautiful urban landscapes are a matter of movement, valued here in opposition to both a modern aesthetic of shock (the brutal juxtaposition of old factories and traces of the past) and an aesthetic of the sublime (which, by exposing the subject to its constitutional limits, would in reaction ground a modern subject). Hybridity here takes on a new meaning: it is the open composition of a variety of historical practices of urban space, as distinct from the model of colonization (of one reality by another, the biological model of greffage), or the alienating space of modern urban sociality.89 This latter understanding of the social subscribes in the end to the ideology of the domus: it remains trapped in a logic of perversion and transgression, never opening beyond the boundaries of a space ontologically defined by negativity. In that respect, the genealogy of urban practices I draw in this book departs from and flirts with a line of thought that runs from Georg Simmel’s conception of sociability to Maurice Blanchot’s nihilist everyday and even Leo Bersani’s sociality of cruising. For these forms of hybridity rely on both the nostalgic desire for the domus and the homogenization of urban space (in the public space of exchange articulated by the modern transport system). Contrariwise, hybridity in Kafū’s Fair-Weather Clogs makes visible the interpenetration of multiple temporalities without assignable origin, where the fragmented logic of struggle and exclusion is replaced by the movement of affects in urban landscapes, minimally defined as a movement of meeting and parting. Yet there is more at stake in this urban aesthetics. While on the one hand there is a desire to channel the disruptive movement of urban space within a total view that captures in a fixed frame the movement of urban affects,

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there is as well a resistance to the complete abstraction of such views from both local nature and the global and planetary urban. The tension between movement and stasis, by posing as one between life and death, constitutes a claim for a perspectivalism that opens a beautiful landscape to both local and global spaces of experience, the natural and the planetary, in a continuous movement of transit. Hence the view from/of, both from the bridge and of the bridge, that we find in The River Sumida, in suspension between land and water, between the global, the local, and the national.90 And it is in this suspension that the local, intensified, opens to its planetary becomings. The essay on water ends with an interesting “return to Japan.” Discussing the imperial castle moats and Ueno park’s Shinobazu pond, two national spaces par excellence, Watashi argues for the incomparable natural beauty of the castle moats and laments the impossibility of capturing it in words: “The moats of the Edo castle are really the corona of Water aesthetics. However, rather than taking a pen to describe them, nothing will never surpass the skill of a painting.”91 But he speaks of the Edo castle, renamed imperial castle after the Meiji restoration and the relocation of the Emperor repackaged as modern monarch in the new capital. It is this displacement of the name that makes it possible to speak of the natural, local beauty of the castle moats. Coming from Kafū, and after having praised the aesthetic of urban ditches for the gap between their beautiful name (he gives the example of “Sakura river”) and their filthy waters, this change of name implies more than a standard critique of the modern imperial system.92 As in Tayama Katai’s praise for old stations, Kafū’s interest is in a centrality that has been displaced and presents an internal fissure, a crack that reopens global urbanity to its planetary becomings. Similarly, when love for the country (aikokushugi) is invoked in the last essay, “Setting Sun and Mount Fuji,” to argue for both the preservation of local beauty (kyōdo no bi) and a purification of the national language (kokugo no junka senren), it occurs in a celebration of the visual perspectives offered by the view from Mount Fuji. There is no longer irony here: Mount Fuji is about the danger of being flooded not only by the imperialist flows of global history but also (as I suggest in conclusion) by the chaotic flows of the urban planetary. The tone is now that of a preacher articulating in poetic images a desire for a local, safe, and harmonious dwelling place, one not only Japanese but also of Edo. Mount Fuji is not celebrated as a beautifully framed and closed picture. Like the Edo castle moats, its interest resides in the tension it generates between a local nature abstracted from the logic of the state and a planetary space of urban movement, in a dwelling form circulated at the surface of a national landscape of movements.

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Mount Fuji functions outside of the imperial logic of opposition between the panoramic space of Tokyo and the labyrinthine or worm-like space of Kyoto, between the masculine and the feminine emperor.93 Instead, like the Tokyo back alleys (roji), Mount Fuji is valued for the perspectival space it opens to an urban subject in transit: “Having contrasted steel bridges and the ferry boats, there now comes to mind the interest in the back-alleys hidden between the elegant main roads.”94 The alternative cartography of the roji reveals a hidden world of popular everyday life. Most importantly, the roji present a unique perspective on the façades of Japanese modernity: “In the same way one at night looks at the lamps of the main street from the pitchblack back-alleys, there is without a doubt an interest of a different sort lying there.”95 Perspectivalism is thus the turning of the bystander into a voyant (seer).

The River Sumida: Flooding the Littoral City As Kafū explains in the preface to the fifth edition of The River Sumida,96 this is a novel about the ravaged landscapes of his Tokyo, devastated by changes brought by planetary urbanization and modernization, those changes, both human and planetary, expressed by the apocalyptic image of floods—or, in Fair-Weather Clogs, the urban stroller’s ubiquitous umbrella. By revisiting the near past of early Meiji Tokyo, Kafū can engage with a present of change and evanescence in which places leak from all sides, merging into each other in the flows of the littoral city. Discussing urban space in terms of littoral cities allows us to detach urbanization from modernization and recover other urban narratives, ones populated by leaking subjects dwelling in disjoint dwelling places and learning to navigate a world of change on the brink of disaster. For the urban planetary, always in tension with global modernization, emerges in precarious, temporary, and fragile places. And in this context, littoral cities can become places of refuge in the face of monumental changes brought by urbanization, modernization, and planetary movements of all sorts. The River Sumida was first published in 1909 in the literary journal Shinshōsetsu and went through a series of republications. A sort of sequel to Higuchi Ichiyō’s 1896 novel Growing Up (Takekurabe), it centers on the melancholic boy, Chōkichi, who refuses to accept change, specifically to let go of his childhood girlfriend and his attraction to the world of theater. The story ends abruptly with Chōkichi sick and without any possible resolution. Kafū planned to write a sequel, but the project was dropped after two installments published in 1917 in the literary journal Bungei under the

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title Tsukuribanashi (made-up story).97 In these abortive installments, Kafū, already prefiguring the novel-about-the-novel that was to become A Strange Tale of East of the River (1937), reflected on the art of storytelling, his experiences of Tokyo and writing Tokyo, and possible endings, among them an apocalyptic flooding of the living quarters of all the protagonists by the river Sumida. This unexpected (and unrealized) ending, which leaves our heroes precariously taking refuge on little urban, made-up islands, manifests a representative if extreme form taken by urban dwelling places in the littoral city. In his reading of Higuchi Ichiyō’s Growing Up, Maeda Ai explains how the story of the young girl Midori moving from Daionjimae to Yoshiwara to become a geisha can be read as an allegory for the expansion of the urban frontier into the rural, displacing its everyday rhythms and dislocating its communities and water flows, ultimately replacing them with a land structure articulated by commodity flows.98 Yet as Anne McKnight argues, “despite his emphasis on layered temporality, Maeda, too, focuses on the transcendental narrator in his analyses of urban space and literature through his emphasis on subjectivity (shutaisei) and perspective as the determinants of textual meaning”—rather like Karatani Kōjin in his landscape theory (chapter 2).99 Where Maeda’s reading returns us to the alienated bourgeois subject, Kafū instead needs to be read in terms of atmospheric subjectivities emerging from planetary processes at work in the interstices and fissures of Tokyo as it becomes a littoral city. The River Sumida is a short novel, less than forty pages in Seidensticker’s translation, and ends abruptly. The story takes place over one year, starting in summer and ending with the rainy season; the narration is united by this cyclical, seasonal pattern, echoing previous years in the upper reaches of the river Sumida. The main protagonists—Chōkichi, his widowed mother Otoyo, his childhood friend and soon-to-be geisha Oito, and Oito’s widowed mother—live in the vicinity of the Imado Bridge; in Ko-ume, on the other side of the Sumida, live Chōkichi’s uncle Ragetsu, a decadent old poet, and his ex-geisha wife Otaki. The Sumida unifies all these urban places isolated from each other like so many islands. The novel starts with a visit of Ragetsu to meet Otoyo (his elder sister), who immediately pesters him about the planned move of the cemetery and the need to deal with filial duties, the same duties she expects from seventeen-year-old Chōkichi, busy with summer school in preparation for high school and university. Otoyo wants her only son to succeed notwithstanding the fall of her house: her father’s pawnbroker business declined when her husband succeeded to it, and ultimately the business literally went up in flames during the Meiji Restoration. Widowed,

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her only option was to capitalize on her shamisen skills and become a music teacher. Her son was another story. Already we see that the story is from the start a national allegory, where the life of individuals echoes national events, in particular the transition from Edo to Meiji as experienced by Meiji youth, as well as exemplifying the new ideal of “Rise into the World” (risshin shusse) and, as Ragetsu points out, streetcars. Yet Ragetsu likes to walk the old streets of Tokyo, although he remains for the most confined to the places he knows intimately on the other side of the river Sumida. His sister Otoyo by contrast almost never leaves her school. As for Oito, she is destined to become a geisha, and the exhausted mother cannot tolerate the friendship and growing desire of her son. As if a sequel to Higuchi Ichiyo’s Growing Up, the novel begins when Oito (= Midori) is socialized through geisha schooling. The main difference is that Oito does not explicitly reject her new condition and the changes it signifies—such as the end of her friendship with Chōkichi; it is rather Chōkichi who resists change and maturation in the name of the “Japanese Spirit.” He hates military-style sports classes, preferring calligraphy and poetry classes (rather like Kafū the dandy), and decides to abandon his studies to become an actor. The narrative rhythm, which initially followed the passing of seasons in urban landscapes, becomes increasingly controlled by Chōkichi’s continual illness—he never seems to fully heal from an unexplained disease, and the novel ends with Chōkichi in a hospital after the flooding of the Senzoku area and Ragetsu looking for a drink while staying at Otoyo’s house. In a dialogue with the literary scholars Isoda Kōichi and Nakajima Kunihiko, Maeda Ai makes three important remarks about Nagai Kafū and The River Sumida that guide my reflection.100 First, he notes how Kafū is exceptional among Japanese modern writers for having never written about the country or suburban spaces, confining himself to urban localities, as if there were no exterior to the urban. Second, he discusses the technique of miniaturization at work in The River Sumida. That is, the story starts as a conventional melodrama, staging the passions of individuals almost like a Jamesonian national allegory, but develops into a story about the Sumida river and Tokyo the littoral city. The individual characters become smaller and smaller when posed against both their urban surroundings and the atmospheres and flows of the Sumida, flows that in the alternative ending I alluded to literally engulf their worlds. Through this miniaturization, urban places in the littoral city emerge as so many precarious islands. Finally, Maeda notes, the urban flows Kafū depicts are essentially visual.

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In the new structure of urban flows, form can no longer articulate the relations among places and people, and it is now a question of visual materiality—in Maeda’s words, “eyes are touched, lines of sight touch.” This is a haptic visuality that moves the narrative between lines of sight, characters, and the author-narrator. The third characteristic of the littoral city, then, is that it emerges as an urban spectacle in the gathering of sites/ sights, each with its own temporality, in an urban archipelago. As I have argued, Kafū’s work searches for beautiful urban places where fact and sense come together to constitute a precarious refuge and place of rest. Yet this is not a return to a transcendental subject, for the narrated view is of the place, not the subject. The novel presents two views of the Sumida river from the Imado Bridge, revealed through the perspective of two different characters. First Chōkichi: The long line of cherry trees on the opposite bank was an almost frightening black. The barges that had seemed to be having such a good time but a little while before had all disappeared up the river. Only a few boats were left behind, bobbing like leaves, fishing boats on their way home, apparently. The surface of the river Sumida was broad and empty again, still and even sad. Chōkichi wandered absently about, now leaning against the railing of Imado Bridge, now stepping down from the stone embankment to the ferry wharf, gazing at the aspects of the river from afternoon into evening, from evening into night. Oito had promised to meet him on Imado Bridge, when it was dark enough that they would not be recognized. (ch. 2: 187–188)

Then his mother Otoyo: Otoyo had gone as far as Imado Bridge before she realized that it was high April—and spring. The sky was blue and the sun poured through the window, and the willow by the door of the shop across the street put out its threads of green, to make even Otoyo, a woman alone and sorely pressed, notice the change of seasons. But now, from the low ground in the outer reaches of the city, with the view blocked off by shabby tiled roofs on either side, she came out on the bridge, and an uninterrupted view of the Sumida in April. She left her own street no more than two or three times a year, and she wondered whether her aging eyes might be deceiving her. The shining flow of water, the green grass on the embankment, the line above it of cherries in bloom, the university boathouse with its banners flying, the shouts of people and the roar of guns, all of these under a cloudless sky. And the confusion of blossom viewers, getting on and off the ferries. This sudden flood of color was too much for the weary Otoyo. (ch. 8: 209)

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Visuality here relies on a particular use of perspectivalism and affectively charged atmospheres that cannot be reduced to Maeda’s sense of a transcendental narrator uniting the multilayered temporalities of the urban everyday. In these two scenes on the Imado Bridge, the Sumida emerges in an intricate play of perspective between the author, the narrator, and the character; Chōkichi’s melancholia resonates negatively with his mother’s modernist experience of shock when she emerges from her labyrinthine everyday dwelling place and is brutally presented with an open vista of the Sumida during Hanami season—this rare excursion being motivated by her need to ask her brother Ragetsu for help, after she has learned that Chōkichi wants to give up his studies. We end up with a story of the Sumida, setting the scene for a rather conventional melodrama straight out of an Edo theater play, a narrative that only becomes interesting for its continuous play of perspectives, where characters mirror each other in multiple temporal layers precariously gathered in urban places that, like the Imado Bridge, can momentarily become island refuges in the face of monumental changes. These little island refuges in The River Sumida subscribe to an aesthetic regime of the beautiful, extracting from an everyday space of sociality an urban spectacle, suspended between fact and sense, resisting the lure of the sublime. The choice of the bridge to figure this beautiful spectacle recalls Georg Simmel’s meditation on bridges published in 1909, the same year as The Sumida River and Fair-Weather Clogs. A bridge is for Simmel the ideal landscape, because it presents in one total image the human “will to connection” of separate elements.101 This “will to connection” is also at work in Kafū’s views of the Sumida, as an attempt to link urban islands and characters without subsuming them into a homogenizing flow of urban commodities. Kafū’s landscapes, however, are not Simmel’s “pictorial artwork.” For Simmel, the landscape as painting creates an artificial unity of place that, as it reveals the limits of human perception in a framed totality, reopens itself to an open totality of nature from which it had been abstracted by the artist, thus allowing the viewer to experience safely the alienation of modernity. Kafū’s beautiful urban landscapes stay precisely away from such a sublime desire for modern urban alienation and its representation, allowing us instead to experiment with the new possibilities opened by the urban flows and leaking subjects populating this melancholic spectacle. Tokyo becomes a littoral city in continuity with itself and opening onto other possibilities of both fictional writing and planetary becomings.

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Notes 1. Henry D. Smith, “Tokyo as an Idea: An Exploration of Japanese Urban Thought Until 1945,” Journal of Japanese Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter, 1978): 45–80. 2. Harry Harootunian, “Time’s Envelope: City/Capital/Chronotope,” Architectural Theory Review 11, no. 2 (2006): 13. 3. Nagai Kafū, Hiyorigeta [Fair-weather clogs, 1915], in Nagai Kafū zenshū 11 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994), 151. The 1915 book version is a collection of the essays published in Mita Bungaku, with one additional essay on Ukiyo-e landscape prints; later compilations of Kafū’s works may or may not include this essay. There is as well an alternative version of part 3, on trees, included in the 1999 Kōdansha edition along with the Ukiyo-e essay absent from the Iwanami publication. For the epigraph I have borrowed Edward Seidensticker’s translation of the first page of the introduction (jo) in Kafū the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafū, 1879–1959 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 67; all other references to this text are my translations and refer to the 1994 zenshū hereafter as Fair-Weather Clogs. 4. Nagai Kafū, “The River Sumida” (Sumidagawa) [1911], in Nagai Kafū zenshū, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994), 211–259. Hereafter referred to as “The River Sumida.” 5. Matthew Gandy, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 6. Meg Samuelson, “Coastal Form: Amphibian Positions, Wider Worlds, and Planetary Horizons on the African Indian Ocean Littoral,” Comparative Literature 69, no. 1 (2017): 17. 7. Sian Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 13. 8. Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–151. 9. William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 177. 10. The debates on risshin shusse in the Meiroku zasshi during the 1870s illustrate the initial tension between the conservative and the revolutionary tendencies of Meiji Japan, to be resolved in the constitution of urban middle class as the prototype for the new national subject. Jordan Sand’s work on the modern Japanese house shows how the production of the new middle class was not only a question of education but also of dwelling, relying on the modern ideology of the lost home. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). On Risshin shusse see Earl H. Kinmonth, The Self-Made Man in Meiji

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Japanese Thought: From Samurai to Salaryman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 11. Fair-Weather Clogs, 115. 12. Fair-Weather Clogs, 129. 13. I discuss this problematic—some would say hypocritical (Kafū was a rather wealthy individual, one of the few Japanese modern writers who managed to live off his earnings as a writer)—desire for the popular life of Tokyo back alleys in the second part of this chapter. For now, I will just say that aside from an authorbased type of reading, which inevitably ends up in a moralist critique of Kafū, the emphasis on the disappearing popular roji against the official façade of a functional and ahistorical urban modernity is productive for our discussion of the experience of urban space in modern Tokyo. 14. Fair-Weather ClogsFair-Weather Clogs 15. The revival of the Benjaminian figure of the flâneur, in particular since Susan Buck-Morss’s work on the Arcades Project in The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project and the subsequent publication of The Arcades Project in English in 2002, did allow in its initial impetus for the emergence of a range of interesting works on urban space, architecture, and media. However, the fascination with the flâneur has often prompted an uncritical celebration of a monolithic and ahistorical figure of the urban monad-nomad, which, in too many cases, ended up losing its critical function and becoming an embodiment of the neoliberal “creative class,” in addition reducing the discourse on modern urban space to the paradigmatic case of Haussmanian Paris. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 16. This approach is still characteristic of a number of works on Tokyo. See, for example, Evelyn Schultz, “Slowing Down the Pace of Urban Life: The Rediscovery of Tokyo’s Small-Scale Spaces Through Walking: Aspects of Japanese Flâneur-Like Literature” (Unpublished paper presented at RC-21 International Urban Sociology Conference, December 2008). Schultz’s work on literary interventions in the question of urban space, in particular in the genre of Report of Prosperity of Tokyo (Tōkyō hanjōki), is representative of a critical approach to urban studies that emphasizes the importance of local life, amenities, and more generally a “slow life,” as opposed to the speed of a global urbanity. In these studies, a romantic image of popular Tokyo associated with the Shitamachi area becomes emblematic of an alternative to the Western mode of urban life. 17. Stephen Snyder, Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafū (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 54. 18. Snyder, Fictions of Desire, 1. 19. Fair-Weather Clogs, 136. 20. Fair-Weather Clogs, 111. 21. Fair-Weather Clogs, 111.

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22. This panoramic view is accessed only after climbing up a tree on the banks of a canal, intentionally disregarding the interdiction sign, “Do not climb” (noborubekarazu). Hiyorigeta, 112. 23. Fair-Weather Clogs, 113. 24. I thank Keith Vincent for pointing this out in a private conversation. 25. Isoda Kōichi, Shisō to shite no Tōkyō [Tokyo as an idea] (Tokyo: Kokubunsha, 1978). 26. Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 56. For a discussion on the genbun itchi movement see Asada Akira, Hasumi Shigehiko, Mitake Masashi, and Noguchi Takehiko, “Meiji hihyō no shomondai” [Problems of Meiji cultural critique], in Kindai Nihon no Hihyō III: Meiji Taishō-hen [Modern Japanese social critique 3: Meiji Taishō volume], ed. Karatani Kōjin (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1998). 27. Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Writers, 56. 28. Fair-Weather Clogs, 116. 29. Fair-Weather Clogs, 113. 30. Fair-Weather Clogs, 154. 31. Hiyorigeta, 129. 32. The origin of latitudes in Japan was established in 1884 at the Azabu Naval Observatory and synchronized with the rest of the modern world of nation-states at the International Conference of Washington in 1885. Nihon Sokuryō Kyōkai, Chizu sokuryō hyakunenshi [One hundred years of mapmaking and survey] (Tokyo: Nihon Sokuryō Kyōkai, 1970), 41. 33. Isoda Kōichi, “Fūkei no erochishizumu: Hiyorigeta ni okeru Tōkyō” [The erotism of landscape: Tokyo in Fair-Weather Clogs], in Toshiron-Tokyoron, Isoda Kōichi Chosakushū vol. 5 [Urban theory, Tokyo theory: Complete works of Isoda Kōichi vol. 5] (Tokyo: Ozawa Shoten, 1990), 291–296. 34. Fair-Weather Clogs, 110. 35. Fair-Weather Clogs, 110. 36. Isoda Kōichi, “Fūkei no erochishizumu,” 295. 37. Rachel DiNitto, “Return of the ‘Zuihitsu’: Print Culture, Modern Life, and Heterogeneous Narrative in Prewar Japan,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 64, no. 2 (December 2004): 252–253. 38. Nagai Kafū, A Strange Tale of the East of the River, in Seidensticker, Kafū the Scribbler, 288. This is a translation of Bokutō Kidan, first serialized and then published as a book in 1937 (Tokyo: Shuppanchi Fumei). 39. Svetlana Alpers made this key distinction in her work on European painting. Although the context is different, the distinction works to articulate the tension at work in Japanese urban modernity and Kafū’s use of maps in particular. Svetlana Alpers, “The Map Impulse,” in Art & Cartography: Six Historical Essays, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 51–96. 40. For a straightforward reading of the Haussmanization of Paris see David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003); for a Hegelian-inflected

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reading of the remapping of Tokyo in the Meiji era, see Maeda Ai, “Utopia of the Prisonhouse: A Reading of In Darkest Tokyo” [1981], trans. Seiji M. Lippit and James A. Fujii, in Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, ed. James A. Fujii (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 21–64. 41. Kafū explicitly opposes inshi to shrines protected by the state: “From ages old until today, inshi have never received the protection of the state” (Hiyorigeta, 120). Those shrines, associated for the narrator with a simple and genuine popular culture, were devoted to the cult of Shōten (Ganesh), Daikoku, or Inari. 42. There are precedents in this practice in the history of Edo maps, and the partitioning of Edo into different areas (one per sheet) might well be related to state strategies. See Tawara Motoaki, Edo no chizuyasan: Hanbai kyōsō no butaiura [Edo map merchants: The backstage of sales competition) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2003). 43. While endorsing Lefebvre’s conceptualization of abstract space as a movement that structures and dominates modern urban space, I try to locate here a possibility for an alternative social space not in a fetishized space of lived experience as in Lefebvre’s case but rather in the tension between the conceived and the lived, between the public space of exchange and the domestic space of the domus. 44. For a recent and provocative reading of the unequal treaties in relation to domesticity, market capitalism, and imperialism, see Mark Anderson, Japan and the Specter of Imperialism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Ishizuka Hiromichi popularized the notion of semi-colonization in his work, applying this concept in particular to Tokyo during the early Meiji era by defining the Japanese capital as a semicolonial city (han-shokuminchikei toshi). Ishizuka Hiromichi, Nihon kindai toshiron: Tōkyō, 1868–1923 (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 1991), 23–31. 45. The main sources in English are Ishida Yorifusa and Ishizuka Hiromichi, Tokyo: Urban Growth and City Planning (1868–1988) (Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Center for Urban Studies, 1988); David Peter Phillips, “Intersections of Modernity and Tradition: An Urban Planning History of Tokyo in the Early Meiji Period (1868– 1888)” (PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1996); and André Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Urban Planning From Edo to the TwentyFirst Century (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). In Japanese, Ishida Yorifusa and Fujimori Terunobu’s pioneering works are still the most complete references. Ishida Yorifusa, “Tōkyō chūō shiku kakutei no mondai ni tsuite” [On the issue of demarcation and improvement of the central district of Tokyo], Comprehensive Urban Studies 7 (1979): 15–34; and Fujimori Terunobu, Meiji no Tōkyō Keikaku [Meiji Tokyo urban planning] (1990; reis. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997). 46. The classic text in English is Edward Seidensticker’s Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun’s Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), which owes much of its understanding of Tokyo to his reading of Nagai Kafū. This book must also be read as part of the Edo-Tokyo Studies that flourished in Japan

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at the time and emphasized the continuity between Edo and Tokyo at the level of popular culture in particular. Kafū however was well aware of the decision-making processes involved in Meiji urban planning and the Urban Improvement Works due to his father’s activities in the Bureau of Hygiene. Minami Asuka, Nagai Kafū no Nyūyōku, Pari: zōkei no kotoba, Tōkyō [Nagai’s Kafū’s New York, Paris, Tokyo: The Language of Design] (Kanrin Shobō, 2007). 47. Fair-Weather Clogs, 115. 48. Fair-Weather Clogs, 128. 49. Carol Gluck, “The Invention of Edo,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Steven Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 270–271. 50. William Jameson Tyler, Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan 1913– 1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2008), 34. 51. Thomas Looser, Visioning Eternity: Aesthetics, Politics and History in the Early Modern Noh Theater (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 1. 52. Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification” [1967], in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 6. 53. They are literally defining a new ground of social life since the post-Meireki reconstruction works disrupted the originary spiral structure of Edo and accelerated the development of a commoner culture. In that sense, the operation of mapping allows for defining the new ground of Edo as an urban space, a ground that is more closely associated with the order of the General Equivalent that structures the emergent market economy. See Looser, Visioning Eternity. 54. Marcia Yonemoto, “The ‘Spatial Vernacular’ in Tokugawa Maps,” The Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 3 (2000): 655. 55. Tawara Motoaki, Edo no chizuyasan, mentions the existence of 124 edition companies over the history of Edo commercial cartography. For an exhaustive history of Edo maps, see Iida Ryūichi and Tawara Motoaki, eds., Edozu no rekishi [The history of Edo maps], 2 vols. (Tokyo: Tsukiji Shokan, 1988). 56. The historian of cartography Unno Kazutaka argues that Japanese maps of the Edo periods have a practical (as administrative documents and way-finding tools) as well as rhetorical (propaganda, literary purposes) and ornamental (decoration) character. The large size of earlier Edo maps made their practical use mostly limited to indoor spaces (tatami rooms). Unno Kazutaka, “Cartography in Japan,” in Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, vol. 2, book 2 of The History of Cartography, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 57. A color version of this map is available online at https://archive​.library​.metro​ .tokyo​.lg​.jp​/da​/detail​?tilcod​=0000000013​-00042255. 58. Tawara Motoaki, Edo no chizuyasan, 24. The proportion of warrior lands did not vary significantly during the Edo era, Naitō Akira evaluating them at 68.9 percent for the early Edo era, and an 1870 survey giving an estimate of 68.6 percent for the Edo funai (Edo city proper, the limits of which fluctuated over time).

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59. The lisibility of Owariya maps relies on the contrasting use of colors, where in the case of Kingodō it is necessary to read textual marks in order to identify the nature of specific areas. The seven colors used are red (temples and shrines lands), yellow (roads and bridges), blue (water), grey (commoner buildings), and white (bushi lands), while black is reserved for zoning and letters. Tawara understands the success of the Owariya edokirizu as a function of their rational character while at the same time noticing their lack of topographical accuracy. Tawara Motoaki, Edo no chizuyasan (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2003), 20. 60. By social form, I mean a historical mode of control assuring the reproduction of society. This does not necessarily imply a homogenization of the social, as in the modern production of abstract space. Tokugawa Japan, for example, functioned as a space of heterogeneity with a singular economy of movement between its social spaces. 61. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskoweic, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22. 62. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 27. 63. “In that respect, we have to see these inaccurate Edo maps as coming from a method clearly more intuitive and impressionistic than the accurate new maps of Tokyo.” Fair-Weather Clogs, 129. 64. Fair-Weather Clogs, 129. 65. Fair-Weather Clogs, 128. 66. Isoda Kōichi, Shisō to shite no Tōkyō [Tokyo as an idea]. 67. Fair-Weather Clogs, 131. Narushima Ryūhoku (1837–1884) was a former Shogunal scholar who became famous during the Meiji era as a journalist and writer of satires as well as for a travelogue published after his travel to Europe in 1872–1873. He is particularly well known for his critiques of the new government and his attachment to the commoner culture of Shitamachi. Narushima Ryūhoku, New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West: Narushima Ryuhoku Reports from Home and Abroad [1873], trans. Matthew Fraleigh (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). Utagawa Yoshiiku (1833–1903), also called Ochiai Yoshiiku, was an artist of the Utagawa school famous for his ukiyo-e (wood-block prints) and his participation in nishikie shinbun (early Meiji newspapers making an extensive use of color illustrations). Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915) was a Meiji ukiyo-e artist famous for the composite style—drawing from both Edo and Western techniques—of his views of Meiji Tokyo. All three artists are usually understood as emphasizing continuity with Edo in a nostalgic desire for preserving the past, but I think the point here is rather the dynamic energy of the early Meiji era actualized in hybrid and experimental cultural forms. 68. Hiyorigeta, 131. 69. Ueda Makoto, “Nagai Kafū,” in Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 38. 70. The short phrase “dragging my fair-weather clogs I walk the city” recurs continually through the essays.

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71. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 17. 72. Ronald Bogue, “Rhizomusicosmology,” SubStance 20, no. 3 (1991): 7. “Rhythm” is here opposed to “measure.” It is a process of transcoding between several milieus, a becoming operating “not in a homogeneous space-time [as measure] but with heterogeneous blocks.” In other words, rhythm points at the movement of differentiation internal to a territory emerging in a multiplicity of milieus. 73. Centrality in this reading of Henri Lefebcre is not a matter of occupying a place of power or having access to material or intellectual resources but of the emergence and disappearance in any-place-whatever of urban dwelling places. 74. Deleuze and Guattari define three moments in the constitution of a territory: “a point in stability, a circle of property, and an opening to the outside” (Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, 17). Their model is based on a radical critique of the domus and the Freudian family romance and so, as we move into the streets and waterways of Tokyo, calls for the introduction of the concept of perspectivalism (itself borrowed from Deleuze’s later work on Leibniz). 75. Gandy, The Fabric of Space. See also Gandy, “Queer Ecology: Nature, Sexuality, and Heterotopic Alliances,” Environment and Planning: Society and Space 30 (2012): 727–747; and Gandy, “Urban Atmospheres,” Cultural Geographies 24, no. 3 (2017): 353–337. 76. As I have explained in an article on the Japanese multimedia work Demon Slayer, in reference to Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetic theory, “Deformation is not a transformation of form in an ongoing series regulated by juridical norms and their associated disciplinary places. Transformation subordinates forces to movement for value-abstraction while deformation subordinates movement to force: it is the application of force in place. As such, deformation is always embodied, static, and in place.” Christophe Thouny, “Corona Eroguro: Oni Longing for a Face,” Transcommunication 8, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 146–158. 77. Gandy, “Queer Ecology,” 733. 78. Fair-Weather Clogs, 140. 79. Gandy, The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2014), 3. 80. Émile Magne, L’esthétique des villes (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1908), 210, my translation. Magne’s book starts by criticizing archeologists, those antiquarians who are only satisfied once a stone has been carefully dated, and then left in place, monumentalized. What is the value, he wonders, of preserving the Paris of old, with its narrow, dirty streets, when the city breathes the new and is in constant change? Urban beauty for Magne, as for Kafū, is not based on the indiscriminate fetishization and monumentalization of ruins that turns Paris into a theme park for global tourists. 81. Fair-Weather Clogs, 46. 82. Fair-Weather Clogs, 45.

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83. The Odaiba batteries were the last attempt to strengthen the coastal defenses of Japan, following the theories of Sakuma Shōzan (1811–1864), themselves based on the Chinese official Wei Yuan’s call for the defense of Chinese coasts. Of the eleven batteries of the initial project, only seven were completed by 1864, six of them on reclaimed lands of the Tokyo Bay. On Wei Yuan, see Christine Cornet, “Wei Yuan et la conception chinoise du monde maritime,” [Wei Yuan and the Chinese conception of the maritime world], in Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, ed., L’évolution de la pensée navale [The evolution of naval thought] (Paris: FEDN/Economica 41, 1990), 153–163. On the connection between Sakuma Shōzan and Wei Yuan, see Sakuma Shōzan, “Reflections on My Errors (Seiken-roku)” [1854], in Sources of Japanese Tradition Volume II, ed. William Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E. Tiedmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 633–637; and Harry Harootunian, “The Action of Culture: Sakuma Shōzan,” in Toward Restoration: The Growth of Political Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), 129–183. 84. In later texts, Nagai Kafū does in fact rely on a clear geographical boundary, the Sumida River, to localize the modern Shitamachi of Tokyo. A Strange Tale from East of the River (Bokutō Kidan) [1937], translated by Edward Seidensticker in Kafū the Scribbler, is an obvious example where the crossing of a body of water means the entry into another world. 85. Fair-Weather Clogs, 143. Tatsumi is the name for the Fukagawa area used during the Edo era; Fukagawa was famous for its geisha, called Tatsumi-geisha. 86. Fair-Weather Clogs, 144. 87. I borrow here from Harry Harootunian's reading of Ernst Bloch. Harry Harootunian, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism (Columbia University Press, 2015). 88. For a recent analysis of Sumo as an invented tradition see Lee A. Thompson, “The Invention of the Yokozuna and the Championship System; Or, Futahaguro’s Revenge,” in Mirror of Modernity, ed. Stephen Vlastos, 174–189. 89. Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” trans. Susan Hanson, in Yale French Studies 73, Everyday Life (1987): 12–20. Leo Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 3, no. 1 (2002): 11–31. Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability,” trans. Everett C. Hugues, American Journal of Sociology 55, no. 3 (Nov. 1949): 254–261. 90. As in the case of Katai’s near-suburb, this is not an argument for liminality. Perspectivalism does not address the same set of concerns as the concept of liminality, which, coming from anthropology and despite claims for its subversive potential, is too often about the reproduction of social order in and by means of the temporary suspension (in time and space) of social rules. 91. Fair-Weather Clogs, 148–149. 92. Fair-Weather Clogs, 52. This ironic use of perspectivalism to subvert national fascist aesthetics is similar to Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s example of old and modern toilets to illustrate his aesthetics of shadows: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, In Praise of Shadows,

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trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward Seidensticker (Sedgwick, ME: Leete’s Island Books, 1977). 93. Kären Wigen, Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600–1912 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 82. “Panoramic” here is taken in de Certeau’s understanding of the concept. “Worm-like” is an expression I borrow from Ishizaka Mikimasa, Toshi no meiro: Chizu no naka no kafū [The labyrinth of the city: Kafū inside the map] (Tokyo: Hakujisha, 1994), 23. 94. Fair-Weather Clogs, 152. In her book on Nakagami Kenji, Anne McKnight argues that the roji become in Nakagami the marker of the buraku and a fictional space for reimagining habitual categories of difference. Anne McKnight, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011). 95. Fair-Weather Clogs, 154. 96. Nagai Kafū, “Dai goban sumidagawa no jo” [Preface to the 5th edition of The River Sumida, 1913], in Nagai Kafū zenshū, vol. 11 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994), 193–194. 97. Nagai Kafū, “Tsukuribanashi” [Fantasy, 1917], in Nagai Kafū zenshū, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974), 66–72. 98. Maeda Ai, “Their Time as Children: A Study of Higuchi Ichiyō’s Growing Up (Takekurabe)” [1975], trans. Edward Fowler, in Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, ed. James Fujii (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 109–143. 99. McKnight, Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity, 127. 100. Isoda Kōichi, Maeda Ai, and Nakajima Kunitoshi, “Nagai Kafū no sekai” [The World of Nagai Kafū] (1984), reprinted in Maeda Ai, Yami naru Meiji wo motomete: Maeda Ai taiwa shūsei 1 [Collection of Interviews with Maeda Ai, vol. 1: In search of dark Meiji] (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 2005), 319–347. 101. Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 170–174.

CHAPTER 4

v

Of Modernology and Parks Kon Wajirō’s Theory of Urban Ecologies

A creative cartography enacts the processual space-time of its own unfolding. There is no subject behind the creative act, existing prior to the process. The subject is always ahead of itself, in the movement of expression. Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics (96)

The Japanese urban ethnographer Kon Wajirō (1888–1973) was a prolific scholar and educator, his work composed of an impressive array of texts, academic essays and lectures, drawings, photographs, and unfinished diagrams of everyday life across the modern world. Each of these studies constituted another experiment in trying to grasp an evanescent everyday in an already planetary urban situation. For Kon was in advance of his time and of present discussions of planetary urbanization and in particular urban ecologies. As I show in this chapter, Kon already knew that the urban cannot be understood by its opposition to the space of the country because, as a space of practice, it is a total and open environment without exterior. For Kon, the urban is a continuous space oriented by a dual movement of concentration and expansion that generates a multiplicity of dwelling experiences. In contrast to his one-time mentor Yanagita Kunio,1 Kon was more aware of the question of place and of the necessity of understanding urban dwelling differently in modernity, in terms of urban ecologies. As urban space becomes “a new envelope of temporal existence,” it calls for a new dwelling form, a dynamic and always adapting form akin to the shell of a mollusk. I call this dwelling form, expressing “a creative cartography” in the moment of its unfolding, an “atmospheric assemblage.” Kon’s theorization of urban ecologies resonates with recent discussions of atmospheres, fragile and enveloping. Urban dwelling places are a particular 153

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instantiation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “assemblage”: they are places not so much to use as to be used in both senses of the passive. In Kon’s case, urban atmospheric assemblages take a singular form, not Nagai Kafū’s paranoid heterotopia (chapter 3) but what I call a barrack-ornament. In this chapter I focus on Kon’s theory of urban ecologies from his pre-1923 essays in urban theory to post-1923 studies of urban customs dubbed modernologio and in particular his diagrams of the Inokashira Park in the western suburb of Tokyo. In the next and last chapter of this book, I then build up on this theory of urban ecologies to examine how Kon deploys the concept of barrackornament in the case of the 1929 New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo. Urbanites search for a dwelling form to make their everyday livable and pleasurable. They must repeatedly compose an atmospheric assemblage holding in the tension between need and pleasure, fatigue and boredom, and in this tension allow for a pleasurable dwelling experience to emerge as “accidental beauty” (gūzen na utsukushisa).2 There are of course other possible readings of Kon’s work, readings he encouraged, stressing either the unique Japanese character of the science of modernology or the functional imperative to plan an efficient lifestyle, the direction taken in particular by postwar everyday life studies. So here I make a choice, or rather a cut, that allows me to read Kon along with Ōgai, Katai, and Kafū as telling another story, one more relevant to us today—and one closer, I would like to think, to the impulse at the heart of his work. As the other chapters of this book, the reading I propose here is speculative, aiming at opening other connections between texts, times, and places to make sense of the urban planetary in our present situation. For Kon, the urban constitutes an environment, that is, an ever-expanding, monstrous assemblage without exterior that defines the spatiotemporal parameters of our everyday dwelling experiences at the outset of planetary urbanization. Although Kon never to my knowledge used the words “earth” (chikyū) or “planet” (wakusei, samayou boshi) in this sense, I argue that his approach to the urban already engaged with an emerging urban and planetary situation that we are fully living today, a situation of ongoing change that manifests as an intensification of place brought about by an intensification of interconnectivity. A planetary situation designates an orientation characteristic of modern urban societies that allows for both an imperial mode of control by dwelling atmospheres (what Michel Foucault called “environmental power”) and an opening onto other atmospheric assemblages beside and in withdrawal from nationalist and imperialist cartographies. In his last lecture on biopolitics, Foucault defined biopower on the basis of “a governmentality which will act on the environment and systematically modify its variables.”3 We should

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then understand disciplinary power and biopower against the background of environmental techniques that first act on the milieu itself in order to change the rules of the game. Environmental power here does not chronologically succeed but rather theoretically precedes and encompasses biopower and disciplinary power. It is a particular moment of governance taking precedence in the planetary situation opened by urban modernity. As I explain in this chapter and the next, however, there is more to environmental power than a mode of control and exploitation. For it is the same logic that we find at work in the generation of urban dwelling places, albeit in an open situation of encounter with a planetary situation—rather than its capture into a closed system of capitalist exploitation. In this chapter and the following one, I thus discuss Kon Wajirō’s work as one answer to an emerging planetary situation. For this reason, I do not pretend here to systematize a work that is best described as open and eclectic—and intentionally so. Rather, I want here to identify and work through a trend of thinking that runs from his early texts on urban space to post-1923 modernology (kōgengaku) and postwar everyday life studies (seikatsugaku), a trend in which urban dwelling practices constitute a local and punctual answer to the question: how shall we live a good life in a planetary situation defined by ongoing and chaotic movement and change? Or more simply: how does one dwell in transit? Kon’s answer emerges from a tension between two positions: a functional position concerned with need and the resolution of practical problems for the betterment of everyday living conditions and a generative position articulated by the ongoing movement of emergence and disappearance of things. The point is that both positions have to be brought together in a dwelling form to allow for pleasurable encounters with what Kon calls “accidental beauty” (gūzen na utsukushisa). In this perspective, dwelling in Tokyo becomes both a question of aesthetics and of ethics: it is about letting oneself be available to the encounter with beauty brought about by the rhythms of urban everyday life. And the affect that best articulates these urban dwelling experiences is what Susan Ngai calls “stuplimity.” Stuplimity, like other ugly feelings addressed in the previous chapters, is an ambiguous affect that does not rely on a tautological drive toward the resolution of desire in a transcendental experience that would reconfirm the boundaries of the subject. In other words, it is not about the Kantian sublime. As Ngai explains, “the unusual synthesis of excitation and fatigue I call ‘stuplimity’ is a response to encounters with vast but bounded artificial systems, resulting in repetitive and often mechanical acts of enumeration, permutation and combination, and taxonomic classification.”4 In fact, one could say that stuplimity is the most

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urban of affects and as such one particularly useful for understanding Kon’s approach to the dilemma of documenting the everyday dwelling experiences of a repetitive, ever-expanding, and all-encompassing urban environment ungraspable as a whole—“or one would be destroyed [hametsu suru].”5 Kon was of course no Gertrude Stein or Samuel Beckett, upon whose work Ngai built her discussion of stuplimity, yet all three shared a similar interest in the vanishing temporality of modern urban experiences and in particular the tension between linear progression and the repetitive accumulation of series, as well as what this tension implies in terms of a dwelling experience.

Modernologio I call Kon Wajirō an urban ethnographer as a matter of simplicity because Kon was as much an architect as a designer, urban theorist, and maybe first an educator. Kon taught for years at Waseda University and constantly stressed the necessity of education to improve the living conditions of Japanese in both urban centers and rural peripheral areas. In his thinking, the urban and the rural are not opposed in modernity, if they ever were. Both are part of a continuum of experiences across and beyond the national territory. In addition, Kon never worked alone. He first worked with the folklorist Yanagita Kunio on farmhouses (minka), and then after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake created with Yoshida Kenkichi and others a new discipline, modernology (kōgengaku), the study of contemporary customs and everyday experiences. While these practices and experiences do not necessarily follow the same categories of analysis, it is possible to group them all under a single term: dwelling. For the question of living a good life is nothing else but the question of dwelling with and of composing a dwelling form that can allow a collective of individuals, things, and places to live a pleasurable life. As such, urban dwelling is always a collective experience. Kon himself was always part of research groups, and for this reason the name Kon Wajirō always designates in this book an ongoing and collective practice and thinking rather than the work of an isolated individual. Modernology then is a collective investigation into the conditions of possibilities for dwelling in the passing of things. As for nomenclature: the Japanese neologism kō-gen-gaku refers to archeology, kō-ko-gaku, the Chinese character “gen” (present, actual, now) replacing “ko” (past, old). The English equivalent is modernology, the science of the present, of the modern everyday defined by a vanishing temporality: modernology is about the moment of disappearance that defines urban dwelling experiences and in particular the use of things,

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rather than the present as past and gone. As such, modernology is not about national nostalgia or melancholia. This is why the translation of kōgengaku into the roman alphabet is not “modernology” but the Esperanto “modernologio”—for modernologio does not emerge from a global world of nation-states communicating through English. My use of the term “modernology” should then always be understood as a secondary translation of “modernologio,” secondary because the national/cosmopolitan language comes after the local vernacular Esperanto. For Esperanto is not so much a Kantian cosmopolitanism as a cosmopolitics,6 emerging from local vernacular practices. Modernology is, in this respect, equally a science and a pedagogy—the two aims of a cosmopolitics, a science of the urban everyday and a pedagogy for dwelling in the urban planetary. Modernology aims at a comparative study of urban practices in place and for this reason does not start from the national but from the local. The national is an effect of local practices, practices that it partially captures within a national territory from which they keep leaking. Although the texts I examine here do focus on the Japanese case and in particular Tokyo, I read them in terms of such a comparative approach—or rather a comparative problematization. For what allows comparison is not the terms of the comparison, which are effects or epiphenomena, but the temporality from which they emerge, an everyday temporality of vanishing. Modernology embraces modern Tokyo without a hint of nostalgia for any premodern space of Japanese tradition or lost things. Kon Wajirō attempted to grasp the fleeting present by recording the everyday practices of its urban dwellers through the use of things. This is a concern shared by many, from Mori Ōgai to Walter Benjamin and others, and as such is not about a Western experience opposed to an Asian or Eastern one but about a situation shared across the planet, because all and everything is interconnected in modernity. In other words, the diversity of urban dwelling experiences is not formal, implying essentially distinct cultures and a “Japanese experience” of modernity, but modal: “a modal experience in intensity or degree, rather than a formal difference of modality or kind.”7 To approach urban experiences as a question of modal differences means paying attention to the movement between places and the singularity of place itself emerging at the intersection of a multiplicity of movements and always leaking into other places. In modernity, place experience changes, it is intensified, and this intensification is one of connectedness, lived differently here and there, now and then, yet part of the same planetary urban situation. This is both a question of ethics (how to live the historical moment) and of aesthetics (how to find “a new beauty in what is vanishing”8).

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As explained in the introduction, “situation” as opposed to “condition” does not designate a fixed, determined, and closed reality but rather a set of constraints that orient, but never determine, their effectuation in local practices. This implies a shift from a representative view of urban space as a determinative environment that defines a problematic condition, the global “urban question,” central to the modern discipline of sociology, to the understanding of a planetary “urban situation” that generates a multiplicity of everyday experiences following a set of local constraints. Building on this distinction, I introduce here the term “constraints” as borrowed from Isabelle Stengers. Constraints set the stage for a situation that calls not for formal but rather for modular answers that remain open because provisional to each local dwelling experience. However, in contrast to Benjamin, Kon is not interested in the possibilities of a “just becoming outmoded.”9 He is interested in capturing the moment of emergence of urban things in their everyday use, or, more precisely, their movement. And he draws for this on a variety of techniques, from drawing, photography, and statistics to, more importantly, cartography—as both image and diagram. As for many, what attracted me first in Kon’s work were his drawings, both image and diagram, drawings that attempted to record and express in situ the everyday practices of urban dwellers in the Japanese capital after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Figure 4.1 is a good example of the kind of work done by the Kon collective. It shows the use of Japanese and Western-style clothes and accessories in summer 1925 Ginza. What is striking here is the banality of these everyday practices conjugating gender (male/female) with cultural identity (Japanese/Western) in an infinite series of permutations.10 This is cosmopolitan Japan, hybrid but never subversive, the categories allowing for endless uses within an ensemble closed on itself. This is a conservative view of the social but one that has the advantage of detaching everyday practices from individual life and psychology to instead focus exclusively on the movement of things in use. This allows for discussing urban experiences in terms of a generic urban subjectivity that is not defined by alienation as in Western Marxism nor solely by the circulation of commodities but first as a collective behavior and an aesthetic practice. The second diagram (figure 4.2) maps the movement of individuals in a private household in 1931, while the third one (figure 4.3) shows the locations and activities of people in Inokashira Park in spring 1926. These three diagrams correspond to the three main categories of modernology, respectively, fashion, dwelling, and people’s behavior. There is a fourth category, others, that is illustrated by the next three diagrams showing in turn a suicide map of the same Inokashira park (figure 4.4), the use and wear of student uniforms (figure 4.5), and the various ways in which

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Figure 4.1  Index, Records of Mores from the Early Summer (1925). Kōgakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive.

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Figure 4.2  Traffic Map of a House (1931). Kōgakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive.

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Figure 4.3  Picnic Groups at Inokashira Park (1926). Kōgakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive.

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Figure 4.4  Distribution Map of Suicides in Inokashira Park (1925–1927). Kōgakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive.

bowls crack and break (figure 4.6). As I discuss in the conclusion of this chapter, bringing the two maps together asks us to think what holds together our urban lives and deaths, that is, what is the contemporaneity of everyday urban experiences in a planetary situation. These drawing are really map-things, dynamic cartographies playing with the point-line cartographic logic of exchange I discussed in the case of Mori Ōgai’s map of Tokyo. There is here no grid map. These are sketches, unrelated to a global cartographic space ordered by the grid of longitudes and latitudes. I already introduced the “Interior Traffic Map of a House” in the introduction and would like now to focus on its formal features, its points and lines, and the movement that they diagram. Here the dwelling space is fixed: it has walls, windows, and doors, fixed in place although open to the exterior. The map records passages between rooms, points of passage relative to the human dwellers, just before they turn into trajectories, into lines. The point of passage is figured on the map as a curved line, open on both sides, a point-becoming-line, a clinamen. And the passage sees the accumulation of crossings, of points-becoming-lines. This is an efficient and economical way of capturing, without arresting, movement—or rather, of reinscribing

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Figure 4.5  Where Western Clothes Wear and Tear (Junior High School Student). Kōgakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive.

movement within a dwelling-as-container and reopening the dwelling place to its exterior space of movement. The house emerges as a space of transit, like the street, the park, or the student uniform. Note here that movement is figured by traces of crossings, traces of use detached from their owner, and the linear spatiotemporal movement of the human across the house.

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Figure 4.6  How Rice Bowls in a Popular Restaurant Break (1926–1927). Kōgakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive.

Kon here manages to avoid de Certeau’s aporia of the map that can only record traces of movement by flattening out a diachronic temporal movement into “a spatial succession of points,” erasing the time of use and never revealing the figure of this movement.11 This aporia is central to modern cartography and thus to Ōgai’s tourist map of Tokyo, an aporia that is by definition unresolvable: it is this aporia that allows for the map to be used to navigate the capital, located at the intersection of a national and global space of circulation. The modern map plays on the tension between the map and the diagram: it needs this tension. Erasing the tension as in Borges’ allegory of the imperial map,12 where the map becomes the territory, only expresses the modern desire for the lost home and the impossibility of accessing it. This is why Kon took another path and diagrammed the passage from point to line. The 1927 “Account of Tailing of Housewife in Mitsukoshi Department Store in Shinjuku” by Kon’s colleague Iwata Yoshiyuki takes the opposite approach and diagrammed instead the movement from line to point as he followed a housewife shopping in a modern department store. Sari Kawana

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rightfully questions the voyeuristic desire of the modernologist to learn about the unwitting woman through her behavior. Iwata is in fact quite explicit: “Once you read my account of tailing, I am confident that you will get a rough idea of what shopping means to this woman. Everyone reveals his or her own vice, personality, character, and even economic class, when they behave unconsciously. I hope all of you reading my report reflect on your own behavior and laugh as you read my account.”13 However, something else happens here, in this cartography of movement, something that is not about the individual woman as such. Iwata is not really able to guess her status (married or unmarried), and as Kawana asks, “does one reveal anything about oneself while unaware of being watched?”14 The desire to learn about the person’s private life and desires is here frustrated, but this is not what modernology is about and not what the map of lines-becoming-points shows us. Rather than an individual, we see here a diagram of movement that explores a space of transit, between private and public space, the department store as temporary dwelling place. Each of the diagrams briefly introduced earlier can be read in terms of these movements from point to line and line to point, points figuring the accumulation in place of evanescent uses of space and lines expressing the figure of this movement in an arabesque. The map of the Inokashita Park is maybe the most eloquent example we have, where roads become a skull and the picnic area is reinscribed onto a map of suicide spots, held together by the man-eating river that runs through the park. The movement from image to diagram, point to line, and line to point is one of intensification, of use as intensification of everyday experiences in place, as they pile up, unaware of the urban dweller herself. Iwata in that respect is not simply a creepy voyeur. It is essential that the woman does not notice him, for the urban dweller is not aware of her practice of place. Only the modernologist is, as a bystander and a witness. For this reason, the modernologist’s work does not start with individual lives or commodities: it is about place experience in movement. Kon’s interest in everyday things and how they constitute our dwelling experiences allows him to avoid falling into the discussions of alienation and reification characteristic of Western Marxism and the form of cultural critique that emerged along with it in the Frankfurt school—with the major exception of Walter Benjamin. Recent debates in Marxism have criticized an overemphasis on the concepts of reification, alienation, and commodity fetishism in cultural critique that has made it difficult to address the centrality of embodied labor in cultural practice and of understanding urban subjectivity in terms other than lack.15

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Sara Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology16 is helpful here to understand how the relation between the point and the line articulates distinct subjectivities, whether of an individual or, as in modernology’s diagrams, of a dwelling place. Ahmed starts from the position of the individual reaching into the world to argue that the lines and points that orient the heteronormal subject can cross in other ways. Lines, she argues, are performative: they orient, draw and separate, gather and exclude. Quoting Butler, she explains that “it is lines that give matter form and that create the impression of ‘surface, boundaries and fixity.’”17 Lines orient the modern subject disoriented by the encounter with the urban planetary, as in Ōgai’s novel Youth, and points mark the turning moment at which the subject is able to see itself lost and start dwelling. This is precisely not what modernology is about and why it is oriented toward a queer becoming. For Ahmed, the queer emerges besides the line, in the movement that “cut across ‘slantwise’ the vertical and horizontal lines of conventional genealogy” without lining up.18 Modernology goes one step further, beside the individual subject and its turns and deturns, between the line and the point. What turns here is space folding on itself and accumulating in place. I will return to this question of urban space as a queer space in the conclusion of this chapter. For now, I want to stress that it is the nature of modernology that explains the failure of Iwata’s attempt to enter the private life of the housewife and his success at mapping a practice of place. The modernologist, as Kon argued repeatedly, is not simply a bystander but a witness, testifying to the ephemeral uses of urban places. Modernology has been criticized for its obsessive drive to record and categorize the most incongruous objects and urban practices, in other words, for being a simple phenomenology of commodity society unable to engage in its critique. The Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) famously criticized Kon Wajirō for his uncritical embrace of the commodified reality of modern everyday life,19 his work amounting then to nothing else but an accumulation of descriptions. This might be the case. At the same time Kon’s practice of recording was far from being rigorous and exhaustive, making arbitrary decisions as to the categories used or which sidewalk to survey (more or less people, more or less comfortable). And as explained earlier, modernology is not a phenomenology, not even a queer one as Ahmed understands it. The Japanese scholar of architecture Nakatani Reiji remarks that Kon never gives us a fully articulated urban theory, even in specific cases, preferring instead to leave us with unfinished sketches, including in his statistics—partial, punctual, and dynamic sketches that allow for the observation “to emerge from within the relation with things.”20 Rationality was central to Kon’s practice

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and to the ordering of urban movements in readable diagrams, but this did not entail a commitment to absolute objectivity and exhaustivity—that would be impossible, and in fact drive one crazy, as Kon says in the opening pages of the 1929 New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo. As such, his obsession and desire for everyday details was not a simple embrace of commodity fetishism, although that is part of it, nor a depoliticized phenomenology of the everyday as criticized by Tosaka Jun. His project should rather be understood as an attempt to reopen urban everyday places, objects, and, ultimately, people to new possibilities of collective experience, and this was for him a question of dwelling, of the temporality of urban dwelling—its contemporaneity—and of the potential for education allowed by this everyday experience of dwelling in transit. This is why these are necessarily unfinished studies, partial ethicoaesthetic interventions, and because partial able to allow for encounters with accidental beauty. I argue in this chapter that these unfinished studies preferring description over systematization, contextualization, or hermeneutic analysis allow Kon to articulate a distinct urban subjectivity, one not defined by the alienation of the bourgeois subject and national desire for the lost home, an urban dweller that needs to learn how to live in transit, between dwelling places. This ultimately means to become more than a bystander or even a witness; this means to become a voyant (seer). For to dwell in the urban means first to learn how to see and let seeing happen. This is why aesthetics is central to urban theory, an aesthetics of the ornament emerging from partial objects, people, and things that compose for a moment a scene of “accidental beauty” in which one can dwell. Kon’s project is thus not a simple documentation and representation of urban everyday life in Japan but rather constitutes a political and aesthetic intervention akin to the ethico-aesthetic attitude called for by Félix Guattari. Kon’s use of surveys, far from attempting an objective representation of the real (he cautioned from the start about the danger of objectifying everyday practices), constitutes an intervention in the flux of urban everyday life to make visible the contemporaneity of modern urban experiences. Contemporaneity does not mean here “to be of one’s time,” to fit, but rather, as Agamben explains, the untimely experience of a present always out-of-place and out-of-date. This is why for him as well as for Kon “one can say that the entry point to the present necessarily takes the form of an archeology; an archeology that does not, however regress to a historical past, but returns to that part within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living.”21 For Kon this contemporaneity is a hidden, because evanescent, temporality of place expressed in the use of things, and documented in an archeology of the present, modernology.

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The term for “present” in Kon is gendai, which has a specific meaning closer to the definition of contemporaneity as characterizing a historical period, here modernity.22 And the challenge of modernology is precisely to capture within a spectacle of movement these contemporary practices in their moment of emergence before they fall back into the dead and reified existence of commodities, in this present that we “are absolutely incapable of living” and yet have to dwell inside eternally, between points and lines.

The Urban Situation Kon Wajirō was born in 1888 near Hirosaki castle, in the prefecture of Aomori, in the North part of Honshū. Raised in one of the poorest rural areas of Japan, he then moved to Tokyo in 1906 and the following year entered the Tokyo University of the Arts where he studied graphic design (zuan). In 1912, Kon started working at Waseda University’s Department of Science and Engineering as an architectural assistant, ultimately becoming full professor in 1920 and continuing working there until retirement. Kon’s work is oriented by a dual concern: the question of dwelling experiences and the representation of these dwelling experiences in modernity. What brings both concerns together is not however a question of realism, nor exactly of function: it is movement. The method of graphic design Kon learned “did not focus on drawing for the purpose of faithful reproduction of nature. It used drawing as a means of grasping the phenomena of the real world through observation.”23 In other words, Kon’s recording of dwelling experiences through everyday objects, from his studies of farmhouses as part of Yanagita Kunio’s research group Hakubōkai to post-1923 studies of urban customs, was always concerned with finding a method to record everyday objects as they were disappearing in their use, to capture things and communicate them in a readable form, a diagram. Realist representation could not work for this, nor the kind of functionalist method found in the modernist architecture of the Bunriha movement.24 For what mattered to Kon was to document everyday dwelling practices to improve living conditions, which implies both a question of need and utility (the minimally acceptable conditions of dwelling) and a question of aesthetics and pleasure (ornamentation as expression of pleasurable dwelling experiences). Kon’s experience in stage design from university days to the avant-garde Tsukiji Small Theatre strongly influenced his practice from the early studies of farmhouses (minka). Kon’s drawings were popular among the Hakubōkai

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members for their liveliness, as he always tried to incorporate movement within the architectural form, the temporal movement of objects, people, and images. As Kuroishi Izumi explains, throughout his career Kon kept searching for efficient means of visual expression to describe a scene as if one could hear the voices of the people from it.25 In other words, he looked for images that speak, speaking images, diagrams. The voices of the people however are not exactly the voices of individual subjects: they are a collective voice expressing the movement of emergence and disappearance of everyday things. From the farmhouse studies gathered in the 1922 Farmhouses of Japan (Nihon no minka) to modernology and postwar everyday studies, Kon is concerned with capturing the modern everyday, an everyday that is characterized by a vanishing temporality. Farmhouses are disappearing in the wake of urbanization, and the urban everyday in modernity is itself essentially defined by evanescence, by disappearing things. Things in this respect are not objects but closer to what Gilles Deleuze calls, in reference to Gilles Cache’s work, objectiles: “The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold—in other words, to a relation of form-matter— but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form.”26 Cache and Deleuze’s work was influential in the 1990s when architects engaged in digital design in IT societies rediscovered questions already central to the urban experience in the early twentieth century. This is why their concern for “the new status of objects” defined by “temporal modulation” relates directly to Kon’s attempts at recording modern urban practices through the daily use of objects—and to why modernology is still relevant today. Kon thus tried, like Yanagita Kunio, to capture something that was disappearing into a past by “temporalizing the present.”27 Yet Kon’s object of study was not the past; it was the now, contemporaneity (gendai) defined by the passing of things, by banal everyday things vanishing at the moment they emerge in “a moving present (ugokiutsutsu aru) developing before our eyes.”28 This is why he needed another method of analysis and representation, which means as well a different aesthetic in order to find “a new beauty in what is vanishing.” This new sense of urban aesthetics, of an aesthetics that allows the urban dweller to capture for a moment their dwelling experiences in a stable if temporary form, is the “accidental beauty” (gūzen na utsukushisa) I discuss in the next chapter. Urban experiences in Tokyo were, and still are, fragmented and unconscious, externally determined by the imperative environment of modern urban space. We could speak here of an urban unconscious, albeit one that has nothing to do with the Freudian individual unconscious always trapped in a bourgeois family romance, or with a hidden

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infrastructural order of production, and all to do with the question of dwelling with. It is an unconscious without depth, a line, or rather an arabesque. In the 1920s, Kon Wajirō thus stressed the necessity of a new scientific method for grasping the changing social reality of Tokyo. And the starting point for his method of analysis was the everyday in modern urban space. Kon defined the everyday by “things” (mono) and “dwelling place” (sumai) instead of the psychological experience of individuals. As he explained, “a new mode of experiencing social reality”29 determines a new form of objectivity, which is why the everyday objects of a consumerist society (shōhi shakai) must be documented in their use. Hence his emphasis on utility for defining a new, empowering, urban subjectivity in Japanese modernity, which necessarily implies for him a sense of pleasure.30 Kon positions himself against capitalists’ prioritization of profit over “concrete means of life—utility—and beauty.”31 And while most of modernist architecture rejected the ornament, Kon instead argued for its reparative effect. Rationality mobilized to articulate a technology of dwelling appropriate to modern urban life was thus associated with an aesthetic of “technological beauty” that was essentially relational, historical, and accidental, that is, an aesthetic that would always answer to the parameters of its time and place.32 Modernology was thus not simply a question of functionality and implied more than passive consumption. Nor was it about an essentially different Japanese urban practice or the existence of alternate national modernities, alternate to the dominant Western model and by virtue of this, legitimate. Kon did compare countries and regions, but he did not adopt an essentialist approach, as did other thinkers of the everyday such as Miki Kiyoshi. In his work, modernity is a historical period in its own right, entirely distinct from previous eras because of an intensification of interconnectedness in local places at uneven paces. As such, Japanese modernity is a singular, historical form of the modern, coeval with other modernities based on the form of the nation-state. I understand here the term “coeval” as a form of the common, of a shared situation emerging from the rational synchronization and affective resonances of a variety of uneven historical practices inside and between national spaces. This understanding of coevality corresponds to the definition of the social as always already leaking, in place and between places. The capture of this movement by the state and capital only comes in a second moment, which is why the everyday retains a possibility of critique, resistance, and poiesis. For this reason, while a number of scholars claim that modernology is a uniquely Japanese way to answer to the anxieties of modern urban life, and Kon did make this claim at times, this reading hides the fact that Kon was concerned with an urban situation that resonated across

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countries and cities, a planetary urban situation that, while it did call for local answers, sought answers that could never entirely be subsumed within a national framework. This is why, contrary to Yanagita, Kon did not appeal to the privilege of a native knowledge or to a national essence, even less an origin. The origin of modernology is dated: it is 1923. However, this too is a nonorigin because rooted in the process of creative destruction at the heart of the modern urban everyday anywhere anytime. For Kon and his team of urban ethnographers and avant-garde artists, 1923 marks the birth of a new, modern, urban everyday, “modan Tōkyō,” defined by movement, speed, and the relentless emergence of the new. In this chapter, I read Kon as both a theoretician and a practitioner, each informing the other in a collective practice that allows for theory to find a dwelling place in modernity. As Jean-Luc Nancy recently argued, modernity is a historical period indexed on a Western sense of time (“Western” here designates a temporal orientation, a form, unrelated to any geographical place or historical origin) where the present is increasingly detached from both a disappearing past and an endlessly delayed future. The modern, he argues, “contains by principle a privilege of the recent, the new, the original [inédit]. This privilege presupposes a time that is fruitful, oriented, productive.”33 Production here must overcome simple reproduction for survival to become growth. In short, the present in modernity always escapes itself from a lost past into a desired future that is never reached: the present is an ever-receding internal frontier of the modern everyday. This idea is central to Kon’s project. The urban everyday he studied is defined by this evanescent present that calls for an intensification and a multiplication of techniques of dwelling, articulated (as I show in the next chapter) by a singular dwelling form I call the barrackornament. For this reason, modernology is not mere mechanical recording but relies on a constructivist approach to the urban everyday. As Miriam Silverberg explained, “by the late 1920s, Kon was fully dedicated to capturing the theatrics of ‘architecture outside of architecture’ of the modern moment in all its multiplicity,” advocating a constructivist attitude: “Abandon copying and enter into a creative (sōzōteki) everyday practice.”34 The sense of rupture before and after 1923 must however be nuanced. The most important effect of the earthquake was to accelerate the expansion of the Western suburban area of Tokyo, following a trend initiated at the turn of the century, although the plan of reconstruction did not include any efficient measure for controlling urban sprawl in this area. Similarly, despite the official narrative of a radical shift in Kon’s work from his early studies of farmhouses to the urban everyday, a shift dramatized by the dubious

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claim that Yanagita Kunio expelled him,35 there is an obvious continuity in Kon’s ongoing interest in questions of dwelling, ornamentation, and place experience. The Great Kanto Earthquake was not the tabula rasa dreamed of by urban planners, the laying out of the land remaining roughly the same as in the pre-1923 period. The Tokyo Reconstruction Plan partially implemented over seven years until 1930 focused mainly on the creation of urban infrastructures in the central areas of Tokyo that had suffered the heaviest casualties, particularly the creation of additional trunk roads such as the Shōwa Road along with parks, bridges, and public schools, while the Dōjunkai foundation took in charge the development of modern-style, ferroconcrete apartment houses to address the insufficient housing capacities of the capital.36 This was a considerable reduction of the original project for reconstruction submitted by the Home Minister Gotō Shinpei (1857–1929), but it was sufficient to speed up the transformation of the capital into a modern space of dwelling experiences.37 If anything, 1923 intensified a series of urban dynamics already in place: rather than a temporal rupture, 1923 emerged as an internal frontier, a degree zero of urban dwelling experiences rather than an origin in time and space. And it was seen as well as opening new possibilities of democratic life. Yanagita too agreed that the destructions of 1923 had a liberating effect on Tokyo dwellers who now felt free to criticize dwelling practices inherited from their ancestors.38 This was no mere naive enthusiasm for modern urban life, as Kon knew that this internal frontier was contemporary to the growth of militarism. In a postwar interview, he explains that his turn toward urban studies was a reaction to the mobilization of Japanese in the country by the military, which made it impossible to improve their living conditions: for him, the maintenance of poverty in the country was the artificial effect of military strategies of national mobilization. For this reason, Kon’s celebration of ornamentation as central to everyday dwelling practices was also a form of resistance against the rise of Japanese fascism.39 This chapter is premised on the hypothesis that in Kon’s work, urban practices are first dwelling practices, and that dwelling is not so much about places to dwell in as about the movements within and between dwelling places, a movement articulated by a dwelling form. For Kon, it is by visually recording these dwelling practices that one can hear the voices of the people. But what does the term “people” mean here? For it is indeed the people who articulate and in the end legitimize his project. The word for “people” Kon uses the most is minshū. Minshū, conventionally translated as “the ordinary people” or “the people,” has a long history in modern Japanese intellectual history, associated with both democratic politics

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and everyday customs. With the emergence of a modern urban culture and a Japanese middle class, minshū was opposed to the elitist culture of Taisho (kyōyō), and Kon’s project was, as for postwar reformers albeit with different conclusions, to reopen private and individual-centered kyōyō to the democratic promise of a collective life found in minshū.40 In the postwar, minshū returns in minshū-shi, People’s History, in the works of Haga Noboru, Irokawa Daikichi, and Yasumaru Yoshio at a moment when minshū, still retaining a sense of individual agency, was being replaced by the concept of the masses, taishū.41 In 1967, Kon defined the masses as those for whom logical reasoning does not work: “masses can’t be convinced by logical reasoning.” But he was then adopting a biopolitical understanding of the everyday centered on the efficient use of domestic spaces by individuals (rather than collective subjects),42 whereas his early work was more concerned with exploring other possibilities of democratic life and agency in urban spaces. Minshū was thus associated with the promises of modernity, of access to new experiences and new pleasures. And as urban popular customs became associated with a temporality of everyday life that bridged the realms of the private and the public, it became possible to identify and map out a new political space of everyday democratic politics outside of the expected space of parliamentary politics. In this respect too then, modernology was eminently political and—despite Kon’s self-professed nationalism and apparent complacency regarding Japanese imperialism—potentially subversive of the Japanese nation-state. Minshū and urban masses became associated for him (and others like Gonda Yasunosuke) with an urban subjectivity opened to new possibilities of political life, of a democracy of places defined as much by function as by affect, accessible to anybody in anyplace anytime whatever. Minshū (people) and taishū (masses) are always in a historical tension with each other, and Kon’s project precisely consisted in showing the local agency of anonymous urban masses by focusing in particular on the everyday use of things as a question of ornamentalism. In an article published in 1952, Kon explains that “Ornamentation is of course something non-sensical, there is no fixed meaning in ornamentation as such, yet I want to recognize the relational meaning of ornamentation, because it allows us to release our feelings of frustration [mushakusha shita kibun].”43 In this postwar article and others, Kon questions the nature of the beautiful in Japanese design and architecture, and in particular their overvaluation, from Bruno Taut’s 1930s writings celebrating the simplicity of the Katsura Pavilion in Kyoto to postwar repackaging of nationalist aesthetics in the age of democratization:

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Do we really have to praise these Japanese mores, and each of these plastic forms [zōkei kakushu]? For they obviously find their origin in the national culture of the state. Even if transmitted from a feudal period [buke jidai] opposed to the [modern] state, I want to ask if we shouldn’t be suspicious of an unconditional affirmation of this [traditional] culture.44

The architecture of the Ise Shrine and of the Katsura Pavilion, praised for their minimalist aesthetics, resonated with modernists from Loos to Le Corbusier and their desire for the denuded, clean surface in rejection of ornamentation. In her work on modernist aesthetics and Josephine Baker, Anne Anlin Cheng reexamines the modernist desire for “the clean surface” and shows that the opposition between interior and exterior in Adolf Loos’ theoretical statements on architecture hides a more complex sense of the surface as multilayered thick surface. In the 1898 essay entitled “The Principle of Cladding,” Loos “attributes the origin of architecture not to structure or solid material, as might be expected, but to mobile surfaces: fabric, even skin.”45 Cheng’s project is to recover an early moment of modernism when “flirtations with the surface led to profound engagements with and reimaginings of the relationship between interiority and exteriority, between essence and covering.”46 And this implies as well a more subtle understanding of cultural appropriation and racism in colonial times, in which modernist primitivism is read as a series of “acts of appropriation [that] also open up sites of contamination that point to others kinds of relationality.”47 Cheng thus lays the ground for a productive reading of Kon’s work to uncover in particular the political critique at the heart of his engagement with urban experiences in terms of a movement between surfaces, an “architecture outside of architecture” to quote again Miriam Silverberg, who suggests that the East/West binary functioned more as code-switching than as a process of violent translation between heterogeneous and distinct sets of practices. In the postwar context of democratization, Kon is unsurprisingly critical of the promotion of such nationalist aesthetics, although in this critique he does not fall into the too easy rejection of the feudal premodern, then demonized by Marxists in particular for supposedly allowing fascism to take over Japan. This is why he can oppose to the Katsura imperial architecture the ornamentalism found in the monuments of the Tokugawa in Nikkō (and famously denigrated by Taut). There is here a clear continuity between Kon’s prewar and postwar work on urban aesthetics and dwelling practices, Nikkō being central to one of his first essays in urban theory discussed later, “Basic Directions on Urban Re-development” (1917).

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The Urban as Environment In “Basic Directions on Urban Re-development” (1917) and an essay published a year later, “Psychological Foundations of Urban Planning,” Kon defined urban space as an ever-expanding and open environment (kankyō).48 In both texts, Kon localized his work in contrast to other established disciplines—a tactic he repeated when defining modernology after 1923, locating architecture in the former and urban planning in the latter. Modernology, he stressed, addresses the question of dwelling in terms of both ethics and aesthetics. These two essays are interesting to read together because they reveal the basic dialectic operative on the theoretical, methodological, and aesthetic levels in Kon’s work, between a mapping impulse driven by a desire for totalization, order, and functionality, on the one hand, and, on the other, a cartographic impulse more akin to the play of desire in everyday experiences and a search for encounters with the beautiful. Kon’s urban theory allows us to engage with the planetary urban situation on a different ground, because it opens new possibilities for thinking urban dwelling as an everyday democratic practice in a space of ongoing movement. In this respect, his work resonates with Henri Lefebvre’s political critique of urbanism and his call for a right to the city. Lefebvre saw in the urban a possibility for a right to the city precisely because it does not rely on an understanding of dwelling as fixed in place but always in movement, passing between all realms of social life. As David Harvey explains, “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right.”49 So when Lefebvre defines the right to the city as the right of access to centrality, he means by this much more than access to urban centers. What he means is the possibility anytime anywhere to access a pleasurable dwelling experience.50 As such, the right to the city precisely articulates the concerns of Kon’s urban studies that I have discussed until now in terms of a question of dwelling articulated by a tension between need and pleasure. Lefebvre’s original idea, while sharing a modernist understanding of dwelling—changing space can change people—was, like Kon himself, critical of the functionalism of modernist architects. For both, the urban is defined by a temporal movement of concentration and expansion in a space in continuity with itself without exterior and the urban everyday by an evanescent temporality, contemporaneity. As such, centrality should be accessible in any-place-whatever, which calls for a renewed understanding of democracy as a democracy of urban places and experiences, what Harvey calls “a common right.”

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Kon already showed such an understanding of democracy as grounded in the contemporaneity of urban places and thus of dwelling as a political practice. A proper education of the people would allow them to understand the urban situation that determines their environment of living and as a result enables them to dwell in transit as they are moved through urban places. If Kon’s urban theory could sound like rational choice theory, as favored by our neoliberal societies and in particular social sciences, it remains unclear who or what makes the choice. The environment is both object and agent, and the subject in the end has no other agency but to find the dwelling form that can best express their urban lives. Dwelling as such is both a rational and an aesthetic choice: it calls for an ethico-aesthetic practice that can allow the urban minshū to exercise a right to the city. Kon Wajirō shared with John Ruskin (1819–1900) an understanding of urban life in terms of a deterministic environment.51 Kon argued in “Psychological Foundations of Urban Planning” that it is the environment that determines one’s conditions of living: And if we think in terms of these binary oppositions, between a Catholic abbey and a Protestant temple, the precinct of a Shintō shrine and the main building of a Buddhist temple, a mountainous nation and plain dwellers, the scenic beauty of a peninsula and an island people, people of scorching sand hills and people of ice fields, we must then realize that we are fatefully subjected to our respective environment.52

Kon seems here to advocate a conservative geographical determinism of the kind later defended by Watsuji Tetsurō with his concept of milieu (fūdo). But in both Kon’s and Watsuji’s cases, it is first a question of human geography rather than simple geographical determinism. In other words, they are both concerned with the form taken by the interaction of the human with a given environment.53 This said, the term “environment” (kankyō), be it natural and/or human, designates an imperative force that does not (yet) leave room for the kind of rational and good life Kon advocates. However, contrary to Watsuji, Kon did not end with a claim for cultural determinism. He rather emphasized the quality of a singular environment as a sort of historical (un)ground constantly emerging and disappearing and thus allowing for a multiplicity of dwelling experiences. The determinism of a natural environment becomes visible and operative only when compared with other environments, other milieus opening onto each other. In other words, rather than a closed and totalizing field of experiences, an environment is always modular, part of a differential field of movement between a series of milieus or ecologies, rather than formal

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systems closed on themselves. As Félix Guattari explained in his 1989 work The Three Ecologies, ecologies can be grouped for the sake of analysis into three categories corresponding more or less to Kon’s own definition of the object of modernology: the natural (environment), the social (relational), and the mental (collective subjectivity).54 Like Guattari, Kon did not create a hierarchy among these categories in his work, nor did he reify and reduce them to a question of psychology (interiority and alienation). For urban subjectivity is always already post- or rather transhuman. Instead, all three ecologies were positioned on the same surface to identify a continuous and differential field of experiences. What makes urban space such a unique and potentially democratic everyday environment is then not so much its actual content, shape, or location but rather the differential movement it articulates between a series of milieus opening onto a planetary movement across urban sites. And as I show in the next chapter, it is the fourth media ecology that made these texts accessible to urban dwellers. For this reason, I propose here to understand the term environment (kankyō) used by Kon as the conflation of both milieu and territory, that is, the articulation in a singular dwelling territory of a series of milieus, turning an imperative and almost determinative condition into an open situation. This is where sociology stops, always seeing problems in the search for a desired state of functional equilibrium as in the debate on the urban question and why modernology is not about a condition but a situation—a planetary urban situation. This implies that a territory, while being the result of a process of abstraction—the suspension in place of a series of movements between milieus—is at the same time always leaking because always relating in its material expression to its historical process of emergence from a heterogeneous assemblage of materials. The social here is not Durkheim’s container, nor an epiphenomenon: it is a momentary suspension of leakages in a dwelling place. We will see in the next chapter how this conception of urban space and urban dwelling is defined and expressed by the economy of the barrack. This conception of modern urban space explains why post-1923 modernology is distinct from folklore studies (minzokugaku) and archaeology (kōkogaku). In a programmatic article published in 1931, “General Theory of Modernology,”55 Kon Wajirō argued that when folklore studies and archaeology are only concerned with those practices of the present that can be traced back to a specific period in the past, modernology analyzes a whole field of everyday experiences in a given present and place, defining this field in relation to an open totality of experiences. In “What Is Modernology?” published four years earlier,56 Kon defined modernology’s relation to

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sociology by analogy with the relation of archaeology to history, namely as an auxiliary science providing the necessary materials for the actual science of society. Yet in the 1931 essay, Kon took a more critical position regarding history’s fetishization of historical materials at the expense of lived experience, which should warn us regarding the supposed subordination of modernology to sociology or other policy-making-oriented disciplines. Quite to the contrary, Kon saw from the beginning a potential in modernology precisely by virtue of its intermediary status between the empirical recording of everyday urban customs and their inscription within a systemic, functional whole. This is why the act of documenting already constituted an intervention into urban experiences, an intervention that also allowed for an educational practice. “The urbanite lacks self-restraint”57 and as such a proper sense of sovereignty for a bounded and unified subject in control of itself and its surroundings. Echoing Georg Simmel, Kon explains the subjectivity of the urbanite by means of an everyday exposure to excessive and disorderly stimuli so that “tired of confused stimuli they simply wish some order to ease the mind.”58 This state of mind is what Susan Ngai calls stuplimity, the combination of excitation and fatigue resulting from everyday exposure to an everyday monstrous environment pushing all boundaries of the organic body in both registers of the mechanical (repetitive drive) and the organic (life unbounded by the requirements of a self-sustained closed organism). The idea of a complete subjection to one’s dwelling environment found in the 1918 article is characteristic of modern urban experiences. “The modern city, in today’s condition, has become the location of both physical and psychological consumption,” that is, not simply the individual consumption of material things but as well the consummation of the individual body by the monstrous organism of the city thus reduced to a cog in the wheel. I refer here to Baudrillard’s use of the term “consummation” underlying both the potential alienation of the urban subject and the possibility for other urban subjectivities that are no longer indexed on the bourgeois transcendental subject of action.59 In the end neither consummation nor a blasé attitude, as in Simmel’s urban theory, can offer a solution to the problem of the modern urbanite, for it is not the commodity form that orients the movement of modern urban space as such—or if it does, it is only in a secondary moment. What are the characteristics of urban experiences for Kon? Kon’s urban theory is torn between an awareness of the dangers of modern urban space for individual and collective life and a fascination for its creative possibilities. In “Psychological Foundations of Urban Planning” (1918), the question of

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modern urban experiences is linked to the one of education. As “one chooses one’s friends,” so too one should choose the environment appropriate to one’s psychological development.60 The catch is that one is first chosen by one’s environment. So, the question becomes, what makes the choice and makes it possible? It is a question of education, because education is what allows for choosing a natural environment attuned to one’s individual development. The choice then consists first in the relation and only in a second moment in one’s actual (geographical) place of living. In other words, the choice is what turns the environment into a dwelling territory, which means that it is a matter of ethics and aesthetics, that is, of establishing the means of expression of one’s relation to place. Place does not preexist the relation, as in geographical determinism, nor does the subject. Importantly here too, production is not the starting point, nor any “social.” This distinguishes Kon radically from later readings of his work in terms of community building, although he did move in this direction with postwar everyday life studies. Here, the urban situation comes first and allows for the ethico-aesthetic choice to happen. This idea is explained in more detail in an essay published in 1929, entitled “Records of the Future of Greater Tokyo” (Dai-Tōkyō miraiki).61 There, Kon wonders about the future of Tokyo: “Where is Greater Tokyo going?” And to explore this question, rather than discussing the institutional changes that would eventually lead to the creation of Greater Tokyo in 1932,62 he decided to focus on its “external clothing,” its surfaces of expression, by which he meant to establish the ornamental as the link between the general structure of the city, its architecture, and its fashion. The household had changed, and Kon understood that it is concerned with an economy of surfaces rather than interiority or depth. Kon started by discussing the scale of the city and for this purpose relates the increasing decentralization, or rather multiplication of urban politico-economic centers, to the move toward finance capital and real estate investment. A polycentric, decentralized city (bunsan toshi) succeeds to the chaotic centralization of urban space in industrial capitalism. The differentiation and unification of social relations of production succeeds to the anarchic concentration of industries. Acknowledging the increasing segregation of spaces of living, work, and entertainment, Kon calls for an intensification of urban zoning and the urgent improvement of connections between those different areas by way of a modern transport system efficiently combining the railway, the road, and maritime transport. At the same time, the external appearances, the ornamental surfaces of Tokyo, became all the more important to the quality of experience of urban dwellers.

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The Biopolis in the Age of Rationality Kon Wajirō defines modernity as “The Age of Rationality” (risei no jidai).63 Rationality though is not simply instrumental reason because always related to ethics and aesthetics. This understanding of rationality already grounds Kon’s claims for the beautification of modern Tokyo in the 1917 “Basic Directions on Urban Re-development” that I now discuss in relation to the urban thought of Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). In this early essay, Kon’s conception of urban space as a totalizing situation of living is closely related to the ideas developed by the influential Scottish urbanist and biologist. Notorious for his influence on the American historian and philosopher of science, technology, and urban forms Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), Patrick Geddes is commonly “hailed as one of the founding fathers of modern town planning movement, a forerunner of regional planning, the inventor of ‘conservative surgery’, and the creator of the term ‘conurbation.’”64 Like Kon, Geddes agreed with Ruskin’s idea that by changing the spatial form one can change social structure. His approach to urban planning is interventionist and relies on a threefold methodology: a holist view of the relation between the human and urban space; an emphasis on the relations between the three ecologies of place, work, and the folk (aligning nicely with Guattari’s environment, social relations, and subjectivity); and a displacement of the opposition of the city and the country onto the holistic concept of “region-city,”65 already moving toward the idea of modern urban space as a planetary field of experiences. Borrowing his famous triad and its succeeding redefinitions from the French sociologist Frederic Le Play’s social philosophy centered on the triad lieu, travail, famille (place, work, family), Geddes conceived of the city as a living organism that can be managed like a household, the production of wealth allowing to move from needs (necessities for social reproduction) to pleasure (permanent “super-necessities” in the realm of aesthetics). As Volker Welter argues, “[Geddes’] classification of statistics based on the interaction of place, work, and folk, and this analysis of economics as the transformation of energy and matter, Geddes writes, are simply a return to the conception from which political economy arose and departed, that of the study of household management and law.”66 In “Basic Directions of Urban Planning,” Kon refers to Geddes’ 1915 Cities in Evolution,67 where he localizes modern urban space at a turning point between two urban forms, the age of paleo-technics (urban centralization and confusion of function sacrificing urbanites’ conditions of living to the dictates of production) and the age of neo-techniques, in which the urban region constitutes a synoptic totality harmoniously articulating “the organic relation between environmental, historical and social contexts in human

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life.”68 In Kon’s reading, this shift can only be understood by looking at urban space in terms of a synoptic whole that expands like an organism (he takes the image of the amoeba) along the lines of transport lines crisscrossing urban space. This implies a different sense of totality, an open whole in constant movement of concentration and expansion that does not have any exterior as such. Kon relies for making his point on a drawing borrowed from Geddes’ book (figure 4.7) that presents urban space as an ever-expanding space born from the crossing of various lines of transport. In this reading of Geddes’ urban theory, it is the transport network that gives birth to urban space, allowing for the expansion in all directions of the initial village located in the middle of a plain and structuring the repartition of its dwellers in terms of class and land value.69 For example, it is in the less innervated areas that slums for the poor spontaneously emerge, unless located on high sunny places, as in Yamanote, in which case it can prosper and be appropriated by the urban gentry. Interestingly for our discussion, Kon borrows only half of Geddes’ drawing, omitting the right side that shows the movement of return from the country to the city. Geddes argues that urbanites cannot find the time to go to the country and benefit from its environment, so the country must be brought to the city to give it form and a sense of limits. For Kon, it is as though this did not matter so much any longer, when the urban condition has become a planetary urban situation without exterior. What matters is how to order the movement between different dwelling surfaces, a movement that happens between urban surfaces rather than within the closed economy of the household and thus calls for new institutions.70 Having explained the nature of urban space in terms of movement and social differentiation, Kon discusses the analogy between the role of the state in the national territory and the role of institutions in urban space. Both are necessary for the working of a healthy community: they allow for the

Figure 4.7  City and Country (Geddes, 1915, 96). Public domain.

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unification of otherwise disparate and fragmented elements. As such, the alienation that grounds the modern subject is nothing else but a reaction of defense against a new urban situation that the state attempts to capture in a fixed order—a condition. If agriculture and architecture were once separated between the country and the city, this is not the case anymore, in the movement of the urban from the age of paleo-techniques (kyūgi) to the one of neo-techniques (shingi). Not only is the absolute distinction of such spaces no longer valid, it works against a positive and healthy evolution of the urban form as the desired ground of a national population. The urban form and the state come together at this historical moment of transition between urban forms, when the distinction between the city and the country, if ideologically functional, does not reflect the reality.71 Yet this association of the urban form with the national territory is not so simple, and there is potentially something in Kon’s urban theory that runs against the assimilation of urban space into the territory of a national community in a that is in a homogeneous, closed, and bounded mythical space.72 To conclude this discussion, I return to the beginning of the essay. Starting from the heights of Nikkō in the west of Tokyo, an anonymous traveler is submitted to the temptations of a series of dwelling places as they are moved toward the capital and beyond to its near-suburb. Each place traversed by the traveler emerges as a nexus of affects with its own factors of attraction and repulsion. In Kon’s words, while the urban center, Tokyo, defined by a higher density of buildings and of external stimuli, might be attractive to some, others might prefer to stay in Ōmori, Kamakura, or Ōseki.73 One might wonder about such a text, in that it almost sounds as if one could freely choose one’s place of dwelling, depending on the degree of attraction of urban places to particular urban travelers. What of economic conditions and class-based spatial segregation? In fact, Kon is critical of the economic exploitation of lower classes. Yet while he decries poverty and slums as a pathological condition of modern urban space, he also describes them as dwelling places in their own right, not essentially inferior to the middle-class houses of Yamanote. In order to make sense of Kon’s essay, then, we need to reverse our understanding of choice. One is first chosen by a dwelling environment, to which one then chooses to commit. This is the turn from milieu to territory that makes a dwelling place. In this essay, Kon thus identifies a double contradiction of modern urban space. On one hand, the development of urban space is chaotic, abandoned to the interests of private developers, without any unitary urban policy that could produce order and bring together its disparate fragments. On the other hand, modern urban space is a new imperative (but not deterministic) and absolute (because precluding any access to a position of exteriority) situation that

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completely defines the everyday experiences of its urban dwellers, without any possibility of access to the means of production of the urban. In short, the urban dweller is condemned to be a passive consumer. We see here the idea of the everyday as the realm of the unconscious,74 as that essential dimension of life to which one is subjected in an authoritative, totalizing, and absolute way. The article thus concludes by arguing that life in modern urban space, being characterized by complete dependency on and ignorance of the mechanisms of production of urban space, necessitates an education in those basic mechanisms and their effects on the differentiation of urban dwelling places, along with a methodological reintroduction of the idea of need and scarcity. In short, one needs to recover a sense of limits to properly engage with this new situation and find an appropriate dwelling form in this space of movement. This is how we should understand Kon’s call for remembrance of a more primitive life, a more simple everyday life where need and scarcity have an educative purpose for the generation of urban dwelling places, conjugating together the needs of material and mental life, for the prospect of an educated consumer of urban space. As he puts it, So in some respect, there is always the fear of seeing people who have been peacefully living in the city losing contact with this age of self-sufficient life and becoming weak-hearted dolls. For them, it is always necessary to instill this sense of a primitive and simple life.75

And yet, the choice of Nikkō is not neutral and points to a national territory that blends together in an ahistorical landscape of movement physical geography, history, and human activity. Nikkō was in 1999 inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List for its aesthetic qualities. It is a major national tourist destination that houses the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616) and his grandson Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–1651). During the Edo era, the Nikkō temple complex played a key role in the creation of a symbolic order defined as cyclical, eternal, and sacred. Ieyasu was venerated there as a deified presence. Just as Nikkō is mobilized in the postwar to point at the complicity between modernist architecture and fascism, so too it conceals an unexamined nationalism in Kon’s urban theory. The flight from the sacred space of Nikkō to the plains of Musashino shows the movement of secularization at work in the production of a national territory—a movement that, through the various texts analyzed in this book, I understand as an attempt to contain and capitalize on a planetary urban movement. As for Ōgai, Kafū, and Katai, the national territory remains for Kon a necessary ground for the generation of new urban dwelling forms, albeit here never arresting urban movement in a national space of circulation. For the urban always leaks.

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The Case of the Inokashira Park This is the theory; to conclude let us see what happens with a concrete case. I now turn to Kon’s studies of urbanite behavior in Inokashira Park, in the western suburb of Tokyo, near Kichijōji station. Inokashira Park opened in 1917 with the official name Imperial Gift Park: it is a gift bestowed by the Imperial Household to the Japanese people. Kon, however, makes no mention of this, focusing instead on two uses of the park—picnics and suicides. Both cases exemplify dwelling experiences for the vast majority of Tokyo dwellers: living on rent without ownership of one’s dwelling places, pathic subjectivity (urban dwellers chosen by their surroundings), and empty bodies (no psychology). I begin with a 1926 article, “Spring Picnic at Inokashira Park,” which maps out the behavior of people seated in the hilly side of the park. As Kon explains, the park is composed of two parts with different characteristics that attract/ absorb (kyūshū suru)76 walkers differently depending on the season. In other words, the environment orients people’s behavior rather than the other way around. Kon looks at people in fixed positions enjoying the time of hanami on March 18, 1926, a sunny Sunday afternoon, listing their activities without any attempt at classification. He concludes his short article remarking that because of the particular time of cherry blossom viewing, the mix of social classes is more significant than usual, as the park attracts a more fashionable crowd. A second article from the following year (1927) is also a static mapping but one listing places where the corpses of suicides have been found. Instead of the passing behavior of living bodies, what we have are small narratives that led to the discovery of dead bodies. As in the first case, we have no sense of individual history as such, nor of psychological interiority besides generic categories of gender and age. And there does not even seem to be a sense of movement here. Yet movement, arrested by the operation of mapping, is reintroduced through the juxtaposition of multiple narratives of gruesome discoveries with more conventional uses of the park (as in the picnic map). In these two successive mappings, Kon attempts to capture and suspend the disorienting movement of urban life to compose a singular image of dwelling in an urban environment. In each map he uses details to generate a realistic image, either metonymically as the part of a whole or as an index pointing at a larger unity. I refer here to Philippe Hamon’s distinction between two complementary tendencies of the detail in realist discourse: “on one hand the detail is a part (microscopic and defunctionalized narratively) of a whole; on the other hand, the detail is an index, a symptom allowing for meaning and

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interpretation.”77 Hamon opposes here two modes of realist discourse, the expository and the explanatory, that in Kon’s maps cannot be distinguished. Harry Harootunian starts his landmark reading of Kon Wajirō’s work with the Picnic Map because it is a good example of the potential and limits of Kon’s exploration of people’s pleasures.78 By abstracting discrete behaviors from individual desires to compose an image of place, Kon shows us a dynamic and delicate tableau of people’s pleasures, held together in a temporary unity of place, the hilly side of Inokashira Park. This map makes visible the movement of the urban everyday, how it abstracts and gathers together in place, for a moment, a multiplicity of individual and collective temporalities. What matters here is not so much the people as the people’s practice of place and how urban practices accumulate in place to become a figure of dwelling, here the skull drawn by the trails. The second map adds an additional temporality, a hidden temporality and use of place, as a suicide spot, which makes us wonder what the cherry blossom viewers would think if they realized somebody had died on their picnic spot. The point is that they will not, unless they conduct the same kind of research or read Kon’s articles—unless they learn to see and dwell by becoming modernologists, that is, urban voyants. But this would be an entirely different practice of place. Well-informed picnickers might decide to avoid suicide spots (or not), but what matters is whether they express in their dwelling practices the temporality of their chosen place of life and death. The urban movement does not distinguish between private and public places, nor between life and death as such, although in the second article there is a stronger awareness of the hidden life of urban places and the desire to unlock their hidden temporalities. In a way, the topic of a suicide map makes it easier to engage with the evanescent and dynamic movement of the urban planetary, although once again, Kon does not mobilize the category of alienation to account for the quality of these dwelling experiences. At the end of the article, Kon simply regrets not being able to document in more details the differences in the choice of a suicide spot, differences between men and women, as well as variations in technique of outdoor suicides. He regrets not being able to compare, despite this being his first motivation. Addressing the reader, he concludes: If you contrast this study with the “Spring Picnic” one, you can understand how much people’s pleasures, and then deaths, take place on the same stage, under the same tree. The hanging tree hasn’t been cut and is still standing. When I

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take a walk in the park, I am inclined to a sort of solemnity, and in that very same spot where happened the incident, am allowed to see families enjoying their bentō, or young boys and girls hanging out humbly together.

Modernology does not teach so much how to make rational choices as how to appreciate the local quality of planetary urban movements—what precisely allows for a choice to happen, a choice of the environment. The modernologist thus becomes the paradigmatic urban subject, a subject whose dwelling practice is first a media practice. In his archeology of postwar Japanese media, Iida Yutaka defines modernology as a multimedia practice at the intersection of academism, journalism, and entertainment.79 And indeed, modernology owes its popularity then and now to the modernologists’ skillful navigation of urban media, from magazines (Chūō Kōron and Fujin Kōron) and store exhibitions (the Survey Exhibition at Kinokuniya Bookstore in 1927) to academic publications and marketing reports. Modernology was and remains transversal to these media and dwelling practices because it is about a space of mediation: dwelling places mediate the urban planetary in place. If modernology documents an urban nature, then it is a queer nature that precludes any ownership of dwelling places and thus the very possibility of becoming a bourgeois sovereign subject. In chapter 3 on Nagai Kafū, I presented the urban subject as a queer mobile subject generated by a mobile heterotopia. Here, it is place itself that becomes queer because mediatized by reports of modernologists and gruesome stories of suicides relayed by newspapers and local gossips. Life and death are in continuity because mediated by printed media and accumulating in place traces of contingent dwelling practices. As Matthew Gandy suggests, the urban is queer precisely because it allows for random encounters, what he calls “heterotopic alliances”: “heterotopic alliances involve or at least imply a coalescence of interests—even if not explicitly acknowledged—between disparate groups or individuals concerned with the defense of marginal or interstitial spaces.”80 Inokashira Park, as the Abney Park Cemetery Gandy discusses, are interstitial spaces, atmospheric assemblages, fragile, and always in danger of disappearing, spaces that allow people with various interests to share the same space for a moment and in sharing dwell together. Parks are atmospheric assemblages because dwelling practices remain first a question of form: they hold together a multiplicity of practices in a figure. In the end, perhaps Kon was not so much writing about the people, or dwelling places themselves, but about the scholar’s relation to knowledge as a series of everyday encounters with accidental beauty.

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Notes 1. I refer to Nakatani Reiji’s contrasting discussion of both thinkers in the last part of this chapter on urban parks. For now let me point that Yanagita was more interested in narrative and the beauty of narrative movement than in the singularity of places and place experiences. 2. Kon Wajirō, “Shinsai barakku no omoide” [Memories of Earthquake Barracks], 1927, reprinted in KWS 4, 319. References to the Kon Wajirō Collected Works (Kon Wajirō Shū), ed. Kawazoe Noboru (Tokyo: Domes, 1971–1972) are indicated KWS followed by the volume and page number, for example, KWS 1, 25. 3. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 261. Brian Massumi understands environmental power as a mode of governance that starts from the generation of situations that orient the behavior of individuals according to a temporal logic of preemption. Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers and the State of Perception (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). In short, environmental power has two sides, one open and one closed, and the question is how to articulate both in a symbiotic relation. Massumi’s work precisely oscillates between both options, as shown in his work on affect and on ontopower. 4. Susan Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 9. 5. Kon Wajirō, ed., Shinpan Dai-Tōkyō Annai [New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo] (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron, 1929), 3. 6. I refer here to the work of Isabel Stengers, Marisol de la Cadena, and Mario Blaser who define cosmopolitics as a commitment to nonimperialist, transhuman plurality, what Stengers (Cosmopolitics I) calls a “symbiotic agreement” and the possibility of politics among different worlds whereby “the cosmos is always an emergent condition resulting from disagreements among divergent worlding practices participating in the discussion”: Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, eds., A World of Many Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 12. In this respect, the term “planetary” is never a homogenizing concept that flattens out local differences but an ongoing movement of differentiation that might or not generate disagreement. 7. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 27. 8. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. and trans. Howard Eiland and Michael J. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 146. 9. Fredric Jameson, The Benjamin Files (New York and London: Verso, 2020), 166. 10. I borrow this idea from Brian Bergstrom, who first drew my attention to the question of banality in Kon’s work on the urban everyday. 11. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 36. For de Certeau, the moment of use is the one of tactics, erased in the space of strategies: when projected on a flat map, movement (which for him is temporal) disappears, to be replaced by a string of traces of a movement long gone.

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12. Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Borges: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 325. 13. Iwata Yoshiyuki, “Shinjuku Mitsukoshi madamu bikōki” (An Account of Tailing a Housewife in Mitsukoshi Department Store in Shinjuku), in Kōgengaku saishū: Modernologio [Modernology collections: Modernologio], ed. Kon Wajirō and Yoshida Kenkichi (1931; reis. Tokyo: Gakuyō Shobō, 1986), 36. 14. Sari Kawana, Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 46. 15. I draw from Harry Harootunian’s and Gavin Walker’s recent works: Harootunian, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Walker, “Postcoloniality and the National Question in Marxist Historiography,” Interventions 13 (March 2011): 120–137. 16. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 17. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 14, referring to Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limitations of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), 9. 18. Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 107. 19. Harry Harootunian, Overcome By Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 149. 20. Fujimori Terunobu and Nakatani Reiji, “Atakamo sūsennengo no manazashide: Kōgengaku to ‘mono’ he no toi” [As if looking with a few thousand years’-old eye: Modernologio and the question of things], Gendai Shisō 47, no. 9 (2019): 11. 21. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stephen Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 51. 22. Harootunian, Overcome By Modernity, 148. 23. Jilly Traganou and Izumi Kuroishi, Design and Disaster: Kon Wajiro’s Modernologio (New York: Parsons The New School for Design, 2014), 3. 24. The Bunriha Kenchikukai, formed in 1920 by six graduates of Tokyo Imperial University, is considered to be the first architectural movement in Japan. Radically modernist in their rejection of the past, their aesthetics was characterized by both a desire for cultural identity and a functionalist approach to architecture. See Jonathan M. Reynolds, “The Bunriha and the Problem of ‘Tradition’ for Modernist Architecture in Japan, 1920–1928,” in Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy 1900–1930, ed. Sharon Minichiello (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1998), 228–246. 25. Kuroishi Izumi, “Urban Survey and Planning in Twentieth-Century Japan: Wajiro Kon’s ‘Modernology’ and its Descendants,” Journal of Urban History 42, no. 3 (2016): 1–25. 26. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), 19.

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27. “Accordingly, folkloric studies and modern studies were differentiated by objects of investigation but shared the same method that temporalized the present as the space/time of both the investigation and context of customs that were being observed.” Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 189. 28. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 193. 29. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 192. 30. Kon’s 1924 essay on ornamentation articulates this dual concern for practical utility and aesthetics in distinction with the Bunriha’s modernist functional aesthetics. Kon Wajirō, “Sōshoku geijutsu no kaimei” [An analysis of decorative art], Kenchiku shinchō 5, no. 2 (1924); reprint KWS 9, 243. 31. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 201. 32. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, 201. The Japanese expression is “kōsaku no bi,” which literally means “beauty of work” and implies the use of technological means from handicraft to machine tools. As such it is a social experience entangled in historical situation. 33. “The whole history of the civilization that was once called Western has regulated itself on the vacuity of the present, always entirely devoted to evaluating its past and preparing its future.” Jean-Luc Nancy, La Peau fragile du monde: Avec un poème de Jean-Christophe Bailly et une étude de Juan Manuel Garrido [The fragile skin of the world: With a poem by Jean-Christophe Bailly and a study by Juan Manuel Garrido] (Paris: Galilée, 2020). My translation. 34. Miriam Silverberg, “Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity,” Journal of Japanese Studies 51, no. 1 (1992): 36–37. 35. Yanagita never agreed with Kon’s approach to urban studies, claiming it was not folklore studies. According to Kon, Yanagita even expelled him from his school, although Yanagita kept denying having done this. Whether or not the “hamon” story is true, it was an efficient narrative device to stage the birth of modernology, as efficient as 1923. 36. Ishida Yorifusa, Tokyo: Urban Growth and Planning 1868–1988, ed. Ishida Yorifusa and Ishizuka Hiromichi (Tokyo Center for Urban Studies, 1988). 37. Ishida Yorifusa, ed., Mikan no Tōkyō keikaku: jitsugen shinakatta keikaku no keikakushi [Tokyo’s incomplete urban planning: A history of urban projects that were not realized] (Tokyo: Chikuma raiburarī, 1992). 38. Yanagita Kunio, Meiji Taishō shi sesō hen (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1930– 1931), 102. 39. As Kon explains in a 1966 interview with Kawazoe Noboru, there was nothing else to do in rural areas, because the military needed to keep these areas under pressure to mobilize their youth as workforce for the war. Kon Wajirō and Kawazoe Noboru, “Kon wajirō intābyū: Seikatsu kakumei no genba de” [Kon Wajirō interview: At the sites of the revolution of the everyday], in Kon Wajirō to kōgengaku: Kurashi no ‘ima’wo toraeta ‘me’ to ‘te’ [Kon Wajirō and Modernology: The eye and hands that could grasp the moment of dwelling] (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 2013), 80–97.

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40. Kyōyō meant “self-fulfillment of the individual in the private realm, without the necessity to perform publicly to achieve a non-personal goal”; as such, kyōyō was related to an elitist and nationalist form of education and everyday life mobilized to counter the threatening claims of urban culture, a “democratization of cultural life” often decried as a feminization of society. Harry Harootunian, “Between Politics and Culture: Authority and the Ambiguities of Intellectual Choice in Imperial Japan,” in Conflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition, ed. Bernard S. Silberman and H. D. Harootunian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 110–155. 41. Drawing on the media theorist Kogawa Tetsuo, Ivy explains how the postwar shift from minshū to taishū expresses the dominance of mass media to the point that popular culture can only be described in terms of masses. Media was however central to the success of modernology in post-1923 Tokyo, making it necessary to relativize this claim. Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 239–258. See also Carol Gluck, “The People in History: Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography,” Journal of Japanese Studies 38, no. 1 (1978): 25–50. 42. Kon Wajirō, Janpā wo kite 40nen [40 years wearing a jumper] (Tokyo: Bunka Fukusō-gakuin Shuppankyoku, 1967), 167. 43. KWS 9, 24. 44. KWS 9, 24. 45. Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 24, my emphasis. 46. Cheng, Second Skin, 11. 47. Cheng, Second Skin, 11. 48. KWS 9, 309–314. 49. David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23. Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968). 50. In this respect, as many have noted, Lefebvre was still working from Heidegger’s definition of a crisis in dwelling, although ending in radically different directions: urban society as opposed to the pastoral Volk. Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 190. 51. Kuroishi Izumi, “Kon Wajirō: A Quest for the Architecture as a Container of Everyday Life” (PhD Dissertation: University of Pennsylvania, 1998). This dissertation is the most exhaustive study on Kon Wajirō available in English, tracing the various genealogies of architectural, urban, and ethnographic thought in Kon’s work by focusing on two main questions, that of dwelling and that of the graphic line. This is Kuroishi’s greatest contribution to the field of Kon studies and an ongoing concern of her work. 52. KWS9 309–314, 310. 53. This point is stressed by French geographer Augustin Berque in his attempt to recover Watsuji’s theory of Fūdo with his concept of médiance. The problem

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with Berque’s reappropriation of Watsuji’s theory is his lack of engagement with Watsuji’s notion of the social, aidagara, as a closed set of elements and the movements between them, ending in the worst form of cultural determinism instead of a real movement of mediation between human societies and open milieus. Augustin Berque, “The Question of Space: From Heidegger to Watsuji,” Cultural Geographies 3, no. 4 (1996): 373–383. Watsuji Tetsurō, Fūdo: Ningengakuteki kōsatsu [Milieu: A discussion in the guise of human sciences] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1935). 54. The late Guattari was concerned with issues of environmentalism, which he integrated in his own thought. “Ecosophy” is the name of a new science of thought able to navigate “between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity).” Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (1989), trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 28. 55. KWS1 [1931], 24–49. 56. KWS1 [1927], 13–23. 57. KWS9 [1918], 312. 58. KWS9 [1918], 313. 59. Jean Baudrillard’s concept of consummation is defined in tension with consumption in The System of Objects (1968), trans. James Benedict (New York and London: Verso, 1996). 60. KWS9 [1918], 311. 61. KWS9 [1929], 294–308. 62. On October 1, 1932, the municipality of Tokyo absorbed its surrounding five gun and eighty-two villages and as a result expanded its number of ku (districts) to thirty-five, making it the second most populated city in the world with 4,970,000 inhabitants. 63. KWS1 [1931], 36. 64. Volker M. Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2002), 1. Welter’s book is the most comprehensive study on Patrick Geddes available in English. 65. Welter, Biopolis, 2–4. 66. Welter, Biopolis, 16. Here Geddes also follows John Ruskin. In Kon’s work on urban everyday life after 1940, there is an increasing concern for household management that marks a departure from his earlier works, more open to a variety of urban experiences. The shift is obvious, and this is why I find it even more interesting to see how, already in the 1917 essay, as well as in the 1929 guidebook, this functional rationalization and totalization in a closed economy of the dwelling place is articulated: an expression of Kon’s mapping impulse, it is set in tension with an understanding of and desire for urban space as a differential field of experiences. 67. Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution: Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics (London: Williams & Norgate, 1915). 68. Kuroishi, “Kon Wajirō: A Quest,” 91. 69. KWS9 [1917], 320.

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70. KWS9 [1917], 330. 71. In her analysis of “Basic Directions on Urban Re-development,” Kuroishi Izumi argues in agreement with Raymond Williams and Kon Wajirō, “The division between city and farm areas is a quantitatively established illusion. As most urban people are from farm areas, city and farm areas should be recognized as a continuous organic entity.” Kuroishi, “Kon Wajirō: A Quest,” 89. 72. This understanding of the national community as mythical space is borrowed from the works of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy: Philippe LacoueLabarthe, La fiction du politique (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1987); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (1986), trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 73. KWS9 [1917], 317. 74. Kawazoe Noboru, Kon Wajirō: Sono kōgengaku Modernologio (Kon Wajirō: This kōgengaku modernologio, 1987) (Tokyo: Chikuma Bunko, 2004), 133. 75. KWS9 [1917], 334. 76. We find here once more the dual sense of consumption/consummation discussed earlier. 77. Philippe Hamon, “Un discours constraint” [A constrained discourse], in Littérature et réalité [Literature and reality], ed. Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 159. 78. Harry Harootunian, “Street, Shelter, Subjectivity,” in Overcome by Modernity, 178–201. 79. Iida Yutaka, “2. Medeia no naka no kōgengaku: akademizumu to jānarizumu, entātenumento no hazama de,” in Medeiaron no chisō (Geological layers of media theory) (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 2020), 42–63. 80. Gandy, “Queer Ecology: Nature, Sexuality, and Heterotopic Alliances,” Environment and Planning: Society and Space 30 (2012).

CHAPTER 5

v

The Urban Voyant in the New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo

Our Tokyo possesses all the qualities of the modern metropolis. With its various interiors, light, dark. From start to end, all facets of the everyday, productions, office work, consolation, amusement, decadence, criminal lines, transport accidents, left and right wing students, and of course all sorts of political parties. All this equally makes today’s reality as if looked at through the magnifying glass of the subtly nuanced and unconscious human world. It is bright. It is gloomy. Every single everyday is in large scales, attributed either to a human or a machine, to a human or a doll, to a human or an animal, or to I don’t know what. The spectacle of the everyday, alive. Kon Wajirō, New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo (1929)

In 1929, a curious guidebook to Tokyo hit the shelves of Japanese bookstores. Sold for 1 yen and 80 sen, the New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo was affordable, though a luxury for some if we think that an elementary schoolteacher would earn between 45 and 55 yen per month in 1931.1 The book cover (figure 5.1) appealed to modernist aesthetics’ interest in abstraction, repetition, and movement, the sequence of words “new” “feature” “of” “Tokyo” repeating itself on the book cover without concern for beginning or end, cut here and there by black, white, and pale-blue geometrical shapes. The box that encased the book on the other hand departed from the cover’s aesthetic of mechanical reproduction, preferring instead hand drawing to present Tokyo as a montage of fragmented lines and shapes (figure 5.2). Factory chimneys, a hand holding a knife, a bottle and a gun pointing at railway tracks emerging from a tunnel next to a dry tree, slanted building shapes. And the word “KINO.” Both images, the printed cover and the bookcase drawings, embraced the aesthetics of kino-eye, visual and haptic, mechanical and 193

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Figure 5.1  New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo—Cover (original edition).

machinic. Tokyo’s ongoing spectacle of movement and change, all fragments of the urban everyday leaking into each other, resonates with what Dziga Vertov called “kinonedelia, the rhythmic unity of heterogeneous themes.”2 Vertov’s writings, already available in Japan, immediately drew interest for their innovative approach to the urban and its everyday rhythms. In this last chapter, I discuss the 1929 Tokyo guidebook and show how it brings together Kon’s theory of urban ecologies with the modernologist kino-eye to figure the barrack-ornament as an ideal dwelling form for navigating the surfaces of the Japanese capital and, as one learns to dwell in transit, for encountering the urban planetary in place. The New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo was an original attempt at making sense of the modern capital after the destructions of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. September 1, 1923, marked for many a rupture in the history of the capital: 44 percent of the metropolitan area was destroyed by fire affecting 73.8 percent of households, mainly the low areas of plebeian Shitamachi, and the number of dead and missing persons for Tokyo and Yokohama is estimated at roughly 140,000.3 If there was a feeling of rupture after 1923, it was found at the level of urban everyday life, as if the catastrophe had become a gradient for judging the difference between the future and the past, between the truly modern and what became increasingly associated with a premodern Japanese urban culture, the modern dream of Edo.4 The year 1923 became associated

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Figure 5.2  New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo—Case, Front (original edition).

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not only with the disappearance of Edo culture in the wake of modern urban life but also with a growing racial-based nationalism, as with the organized massacres of Koreans and socialists that occurred after the quake.5 As argued in the previous chapter, though, 1923 was not so much a rupture as an event that intensified logics already in place. This is why I call it an “internal frontier,” where the internalization of the contradictions of urban modernity, of its promises and failures, set the terms for everyday dwelling experiences and resonated strongly with the global growth of racism, nationalism, imperialism, and speciesism.6 However this has not always resulted in the formation of an alienated bourgeois subject, at least not in Kon’s work. This guidebook has been a long-standing bestseller, praised for its encompassing presentation of the modern Japanese capital reborn from the ashes of 1923. The book was characterized by new, journalistic topics such as modern women’s labor and youth delinquency and more generally by its attention to the often unaccounted-for details of the urban everyday.7 This spectacle of movement is defined by a series of processes of production (seisan): places, images, urban types, forms, labors. Modern Tokyo constantly remakes itself and as such has no origin, not even 1923, which only repeats and intensifies an ongoing movement of urban creative destruction. This is why the first edition of the guidebook was necessarily a “new edition” (shinpan), as the phrase “new features of Tokyo” on the book cover that can equally be read “features of new Tokyo.” As a map, the book can be entered and left anywhere anytime. The New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo is a manual for learning to encounter, see, and, in seeing Tokyo’s spectacle of movement and change, dwell in the urban planetary. As I argued in the introduction, the urban planetary becomes in modernity “a new envelope of temporal existence,” which calls for a new dwelling form, here one akin to the shell of a mollusk. As Gaston Bachelard explains, the shell grows with its inhabitant, an inhabitant that is here a posthuman collective, a mix of human, machine, doll, animal, and whatever else is at hand. The shell is both construction and orientation, function and expression. It is a modular form that figures dwelling as “the dream of a house that grows in proportion to the growth of the body that inhabits it.”8 I call this cosmic urban shell, made of recycled parts, that shelters and nurses “the time of everyday life,”9 a barrack-ornament. As I discuss the 1929 New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo, I show how the barrack-ornament brings together in a generative tension the two main trends of Kon’s urban thought: one oriented toward functional, problem-solving approaches answering to the sociohistorical needs of urban dwellers—how to live a good life?—and the other toward an aesthetic, problem-framing approach that expresses the

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sociohistorical situation of the urban dweller in a multilayered and local spectacle of movement. In the format of the guidebook adopted by Kon and his associates (as mentioned in the previous part, “Kon” must be understood here as a collective rather than an individual author), this tension becomes a way to engage with urban dwelling experiences while avoiding a double pitfall, the two complicit fetishes of bourgeois and national urban studies, individual life and alienated life. It thus becomes possible to pay attention to the movement of things in the multilayered surfaces of the urban everyday and question the nature of urban dwelling experiences in a planetary situation. The New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo was addressed to Tokyo dwellers, not tourists, yet the everyday it describes in a series of sketches points at humanmachines, human-dolls, human-animals, and, really, things. Experiencing the urban everyday becomes again a question of composing the proper dwelling form that can circulate between urban things and nurture the subjectivity appropriate to this situation. As explained in the previous chapter, urban things for Kon are neither essences nor a composite of form/matter but ongoing temporal modulations in place at the moment of use. For this reason, urban dwelling forms themselves must be modular and defined by “a continuous modulation of form,” like the shell of a mollusk. What holds this “continuous modulation of form” in the barrack-ornament is the affect of stuplimity. Stuplimity is defined by a tension between excitation and fatigue in the situation of intensified stimulation characteristic of the emergence and at times brutal irruption of the urban planetary. Sian Ngai’s “stuplimity” is a subcategory of the sublime once it has moved from the rural to the urban or, rather, from a moment defined by the opposition of the urban and the rural to the situation of ongoing planetary urbanization we now fully live. Ngai’s work is an answer to Jameson’s work on aesthetics and politics in modernity and postmodernity after the affective turn. She builds and expands on Fredric Jameson’s initial interest in the shift away from individual psychology after the collapse of established communal frames of reference and the fragmentation of the social in modernity. In the conclusion of his essay “Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist,” Jameson discusses the destiny of Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime: What has happened to the sublime since the time of Burke—although he judiciously makes a place for a concept which can be most useful to us in the present context, namely the “artificial infinite”—is that is has been transferred from nature to culture, or the urban. The visible expression of the suprapersonal mode of production in which we live is the mechanical, the artificial, the machine.10

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This suprapersonal “artificial infinite” is precisely the urban as an everexpanding space in continuity with itself, a space without exterior and in which the urban dweller can only live on rent, without access to its basic infrastructures of production and reproduction. In short: a space in which we only dwell in transit. This “suprapersonal mode of production” is thus what Kon understood as the nature of modern urban space, a monstrous assemblage. In this “situation of radical impotence,” characteristic of urban consumerist societies as Jameson argues, one can either fall for the lure of the commodity in a celebration of the new or fall into the despair of an alienated everyday life defined by “the eversame in the evernew.” Jameson does not really go beyond this alternative but does gesture toward a third option—one I argue that was already opened by Kon—that requires us to return from the sublime to the beautiful by focusing in particular on the generative tension between need and pleasure found in everyday urban dwelling practices and in particular in the aesthetic of the ornament. Stuplimity is more and less than the sublime, because it is not concerned with the individual experience of a sovereign subject of action. It is a sublime stupor but one that, by returning to the experience of the beautiful in urban dwelling experiences, generates another subjectivity, a pathic subject that is both witness and seer, that is, a voyant. For as Kon shows, urban dwelling is a question of learning to see, and modernology is precisely an experiment in learning and teaching how to witness and dwell within an urban spectacle of movement. The 1929 guidebook is thus as much descriptive of a historical situation of emerging planetary urbanization in Japan as it is prescriptive: it purports to educate a new urban subject by recording the everyday use of things. Building on Kon’s urban theory, I show in this chapter how the barrack-ornament becomes modern Tokyo’s exemplary dwelling form and the urban witness, the voyant, its form of subjectivity. For dwelling in Tokyo first means learning to see Tokyo, that is, learning how to read its lines and surfaces and how to move between them. As I argued in the previous chapters, while in Fair-Weather Clogs Nagai Kafū composed beautiful urban landscapes by playing on the tension between early modern and modern maps of central Tokyo, Katai instead showed how the old road stations of the Tokyo near-suburb figure the uneven movement of a global system of exchange reinscribed within a national landscape of movement. However Kon is more interested in hybridity than unevenness as such. What mattered to him, and what makes his work relevant to our present, was to engage with a new urban space of experiences without appealing to an essentialist sense of place and community such as the bashosei (placeness)

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favored by folklore studies, always nationalists and in search of the lost home.11Urban places are not essentially different but absolutely singular, always changing in place and in resonance with other places in a movement of planetary urbanization. Urban places in a planetary situation are stations, that is, temporary shelters: they emerge and disappear and at the same time continuously leak into each other regardless of the distance between them. Leakages resonate. The national territory might or might not mediate these leakages, trying to contain them, but urban places always escape complete capture by the national state and global capitalism. Kon Wajirō was one of the few who could start seeing this planetary movement of urban places and the need for an aesthetic of the ornament to account for everyday dwelling experiences without reducing them to local instantiations of the national or the global. In this respect, and as Kuroishi and others have argued, Kon was first a designer and one who already in the 1920s echoed questions raised today in the field of critical design studies by the likes of Arturo Escobar.12 The concern for place and the historical nature of place experience in urban modernity, the understanding of environmental problems as a question of design, and design itself as a question of dwelling—all echo Kon’s theory of urban ecologies. Kon embraced this new hybrid urban space articulated by modern rationality. As he explained in the 1927 essay What Is Modernology?13 rationality is not a question of homogenization, trying to reduce a multilayered urban reality to a functional space of circulation and use. Nor is modernology a simple phenomenology of the commodity, as claimed by the Japanese Marxist social critic Tosaka Jun: description here has an educative, constructivist aim and one that is not mere formatting. In line with his ongoing interest in lines, statistics, and diagrams, modern rationality for Kon consisted in generating a vector of movement that could bring together a heterogeneous set of partial objects and subjects, each with its own singular genealogies and historicity, in order to compose a local dwelling form. He did not however rely, like Kafū and Katai, on the operation of spacing, playing with perspectival movements to open gaps, interstices, or fêlures. Kon was an avowed constructivist; what mattered to him and a whole genealogy of Japanese intellectuals concerned with improving, for better or worse, the living conditions of local populations was to find an effective way to compose a dwelling form with what was at hand, that is, from a multiplicity of urban fragments and movements. Modernist bricolage, DIY avant la lettre. Contrary to Katai’s flight from the urban center into the near-suburb (kinkō), it is here a question of entering urban space at its utmost level of intensity, speed, and affective movement to then turn back toward the near-suburb

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and the planet. Intensity is a question of speed and density, which implies a conception of movement not simply between and inside geographical places, but most importantly of movement in place, in the qualitative leap between the regular and the singular that allows one to dwell in transit. Urban dwelling experiences in Tokyo are always experiences of transit and as such cannot be articulated by simple, late modernist oppositions like public/private or interiority/exteriority. For these oppositions, as Anne Anlin Cheng argues, had not yet congealed in the binaries of high modernism. This is why the kind of situated ornamentalism Kon argues for is not limited to actual dwellings (apartments or houses) but also and more importantly is found in banal and usually ignored details of everyday life such as the content of a garbage can, cigarette butts, or used uniforms. His use of statistics, a trademark of his work, was also about further opening up objects to their thingness, that is, to their multilayered, historical, and relational movements in place.14 Thingness here is distinct from Heidegger’s hermeneutical distinction between object and thing, for this is not a question of depth, origin, or loss. Hence Kon’s preference for statistics that, combined with expressive figures of individuals or objects, are, as in the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde,15 more landscape than data. They figure movement in the use of things rather than reducing movement to a homogenous grid of comparison and valuation. The 1929 guidebook is thus both a map and a face in close-up and follows in this respect a modular logic at odds with the formal structure of guidebooks found in Japan since the late Edo era.

Urban Mappings In her study of nineteenth-century urban narratives of post-revolutionary Paris, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson argues that political power is always concerned with the “control of proliferating meanings” generated by modernity.16 Traditionally, guidebooks “participated in the work of the monarchy [. . .]. They fixed its imprint in a written text that would survive topographical and social change. [.  .  .] The guides fixed the city and in so doing arrested potentially idiosyncratic definitions of place.”17 After the beheading of Louis XVI, “the city of Paris needed another kind of narrative to make sense of its increasing diversity.”18 The establishment of a new political regime and the radical changes brought by industrialization called for a new historical narrative, a guidebook that, through description and narration, could articulate the part and the whole in a total and closed image of a modern capital and thus contain its ongoing movement of hybridization and deformation. Tokyo of course is not Paris, and there is a long history

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of local guidebooks, from Edo-era gazetteers and guides to famous places (meisho)19 to early Meiji guidebooks published in conjunction with the promulgation of new administrative divisions, national expositions, and changes in infrastructures of transport, particularly the railway. A linear history of Meiji guidebooks would be articulated around a series of such events: the establishment of the big-small district system (daikukoku seido) in 1871, whereby Tokyo-fu was divided into six Great Wards and up to ninety-seven Small Wards; in 1878 the shift to a system of fifteen wards and five counties; the establishment of Tōkyō-shi in 1889 under the special regime of municipal exception that placed it under the direct control of the home minister (until 1898); the three National Industrial Expositions at Ueno in 1877, 1881, and 1890, plus the 1907 Tokyo Industrial Exposition and the 1914 Tokyo Taishō Exposition; the opening of the Tōkaidō railway in 1889. Yamamoto Mitsumasa dates the first Meiji guidebooks to Tokyo from 1874, after the establishment of the daikukoku administrative system.20 Those “Databook types” (deta bukku kei) guidebooks were published for travelers moving to the capital for a short-term stay and provide in a small, portable format a maximum of information on places to visit; the city’s political institutions, geography, and history; and most importantly, its transport system. As Tokyo recovered from the demographic losses caused by the 1868 Meiji Revolution/Restoration, guidebook publishers developed new marketing strategies, targeting women and children and developing pocketbook versions of their guides to sell the image of Meiji Tokyo in the age of “Civilization and Enlightenment.” With the development of the railway, a new category of guidebooks emerged: “journey-type guidebooks” (kōteikei annaisho), which present the various locations traversed by the train in a manner reminiscent of Edo-period dōchūki.21 Subsequently, the reduction of the space of travel to the panoramic view from the window train and the self-absorption of the traveler in the reading of a book led to those guides’ replacement by an increasing number of “area-type guidebooks” (chiikikei annaisho).22 This short history of guidebooks of Meiji Tokyo reveals three main characteristics: a concern for localization, orientation, and planning of action; an emphasis on places as isolated wholes joined together by the transport system; and a teleological narrative of progress giving order, value, and meaning to a collection of heteroclite places. The capital of the new modern nation-state is celebrated by emphasizing continuity with the pre-Edo human geography of Ōta Dōkan (1432–1486, the official founder of Tokyo), Edo urban practices of entertainment and meisho viewing (famous places celebrated in poetry, literature, and painting), and the symbols of “Civilization and Enlightenment”

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(bunmei kaikai), such as the Imperial Bridge Nijūbashi (usually one of the first photographs or sketches), ferroconcrete bridges, parks, and modern buildings (The First National Bank, Ginza Brick Town, the Marunouchi office town, train stations, post offices). But more than the narrative, it is, as Ferguson argues, the table of contents that gives unity to the patchwork text of the city. The Tokyo Guide for Lone Travelers (Tōkyō hitori annai) edited in 1881 by Satō Eikichi is a good example of the unifying function of the table of content in modern guidebooks (figure 5.3). Advertised in its title as a comprehensive guide for a lone tourist visiting the capital, this early Meiji guidebook starts by presenting the prefecture’s administrative structure, the organization and services of the municipal police, and data on the local population, before moving on to modern institutions (tribunals, schools, and hospitals) and modes of communication (telegraph, post office and TokyoYokohama railway, newspaper industries, and publishing companies). The remaining parts of the guide then present information on entertainment in the capital (localization and numerical data), from parks, museums, and seasonal scenery views to quotidian vegetable and fish markets, secondhand clothes markets, festivals, theaters, artists, entertainment districts and geisha, Buddhist statues, temples, and shrines. From this list emerges the image of a highly ordered and policed urban space opened to the circulation of Japanese travelers looking for an entertaining and safe stay in the new capital. A picture map of the whole city, inserted between the table of contents and a table of the districts of the capital, further grounds this mapping of the capital in a national landscape of movement. The temporal and spatial hybridity of everyday experiences in early Meiji Tokyo encountered by Kafū is here neutralized and arrested in a miniature image par excellence, a panoramic view giving the distant observer a sense of both controlled distance from and safe intimacy with a chaotic and violent everyday space.23 Like the Baedeker tourist discussed in chapter 1 in the case of Mori Ōgai, the Japanese traveler becomes here the intelligent consumer of a national space of circulation. In these guidebooks, Tokyo emerges as the center of a modern nation-state, a homogenous space fragmented into a series of places. This format remains more or less the same, whether in the pocket-book type or in the more encyclopedic format adopted by the Tokyo Municipality for the Tokyo Guide (Tōkyō annai) published in 1907, just in time for the Tokyo Industrial Exposition.24 Like the 1881 Tokyo Guide for Lone Travelers, the Tokyo Guide presents the image of a highly ordered space, the place of power of a modern imperial nation-state. Factual and statistical data are organized in three parts—“General Records” (Geography of Tokyo, The Past of Tokyo,

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Figure 5.3  Tokyo Guide for Lone Travelers—Table of Contents. National Diet Library.

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The Present of Tokyo, Prefectural and Municipal Institutions), “Records of the Imperial Palace,” and “Records of Urban Districts”—actualizing on paper the capture of a planetary urban space as abstract space, homogenous, fragmented, and hierarchized.25 The map attached to the guide follows modern scientific principles of mapmaking, where the effect of realism is based on an analogy of proportions indexed on the global grid of longitudes and latitudes and the triad of precision, accuracy, and rationality. The legend eloquently reveals this capture of a planetary urban situation by the imperial state, a capture that nevertheless remains always partial and incomplete, an illusion of control at best—albeit an efficacious one. The sixteen symbols used on the map of the fifteen wards of the Municipality of Tokyo identify the basic structures of the modern nation-state, such as ward offices, police offices, schools, post offices, telegraph stations, shrines, temples, banks, companies, transport transfer points and train stations, ponds and rivers. Next come a series of lines superimposed on the grid of coordinates: limits of counties and wards, railroads, Tokyo trains, steamship roads—and finally a scale that articulates the local with the global map of nation-states at a ratio of 2500:1. The 1929 guidebook is at odds with these guidebooks, though in dialogue with them. Kon borrows similar categories, starting indeed with the image of the Imperial Bridge and a narrative of progress but with a different objective and effect on the reader. As Ferguson argues, modern guides fail to articulate as a meaningful whole the various fragments that compose the space of a modern capital. For her, it is literary guidebooks that would instead, against the iterative and functionalist logic of conventional guidebooks, allow the urbanite to access a whole image of the city, by giving meaning and value to a series of disconnected fragments. The first three chapters of the present book precisely followed this reasoning while stressing the continuity between those various cartographies now brought together in the New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo. What is at stake in all these attempts at mapping urban space is to define the relation between everyday dwelling experiences, panoramic perception, and movement, in terms other than alienation, lack, and loss. Wolfgang Schivelbusch has theorized the emergence of a modern panoramic perception of space in railway travel in relation to the display of commodities in the shop window.26 For him, this perception was structured by the separation and alienation of the viewer from the foreground, allowing access to a panoramic view of the whole; in the same way, the traveler only knows how to move from place to place but has no actual experience of the spatial movement in between other than a panoramic view and a retreat into interiority. For panoramic perception relies on the modernist definition of the alienated subject, caught in the aporia of the totality and the fragment.

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Travelers are moved sequentially from place to place, without any sense of the intermediary space, like the Tokyo urban dweller. There is no escape from this aporia, which explains why modernology and even the Tokyo guidebook do not pretend to be exhaustive or totalizing. The New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo rather emphasized Tokyo’s essential quality of movement, that is, how movement infused all scales of urban life from the production, distribution, and circulation of goods and people to labor forms, fashion, and entertainment places. Kon and his modernologist friends successfully portrayed urban life in post-1923 Tokyo without reducing the multiplicity of everyday experiences to either a functional ground or individual psychology. The guidebook was a compilation of post-1923 studies in modernology, making use of fragmented data to compose a total and open view of the capital for a practical purpose: to teach how to dwell in Tokyo. It was written for urbanites, for people living in Tokyo (Tōkyō jūmin), rather than tourists coming from other parts of Japan to visit the national capital. For this reason it did not adopt a center-periphery model, opposing an old traditional country to the modern city, as in Ōgai’s novel where Kyushu in the south of Japan was the location of origins, meaning, and ultimately of writing as retelling. In the 1929 guidebook, there is no scene of disorientation when entering Tokyo—for there is no exterior to urban space. This may be why Kon was principally concerned with lines and numbers rather than individuals. He was concerned with actual situations and with finding practical ways to improve the quality of everyday lives, but the biographical individual was not his entry point. Nor was problem-solving: problem-solving was necessarily secondary to problem-posing and problemframing. And the barrack-ornament is the answer given to the problem of living a good life in the Japanese capital.

Tokyo Barracks Kon Wajirō localized Tokyo within a narrative of progress toward an age of increasingly rationalized urban everyday life. In this schema, most eloquently formulated in the later 1931 essay “General Theory of Modernology,” rationality (risei) articulates the multiple historical fragments of the capital in terms of utility, pleasure, and dwelling. Each area of Tokyo has its own economy of movement, actualizing in place the everyday practices of its inhabitants. The question remains the same: how to dwell together and, in this respect, what holds together the beautiful face of Tokyo? The answer is not a total image or a particular building form but a dwelling form that I call the barrack-ornament. The barrack-ornament

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becomes in the 1929 guidebook the minimal unit of dwelling, circulating across Tokyo and composing an open spectacle of speed, from the post1923 barracks to the rented apartment and suburban houses. The barrackornament comes to occupy a central position in Kon’s post-1923 discourse on modern urban space at a moment when he was still trying to think need and pleasure together while at the same time embracing the multiple possibilities for dwelling experiences in modan Tokyo. Although the expression “barrack-ornament” (barakku-sōshoku) is only used in articles relating specifically to the 1923 barracks, I argue that it remains central as a modular form that brings his pre-1923 work on rural houses and urban ecologies together with his post-1923 modernology. The 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake crystallizes a double concern for need and pleasure by making space for what becomes in Kon’s urban thought the primitive form of urban life: the barrack (barakku). After the earthquake, Kon and his friends walked the streets of the ruined capital, surveying and sketching the temporary architectures of dwelling built by the earthquake survivors (figure 5.4), literally “borrowed dwellings” (karizumai). In two essays, “On Barracks” (Barakku ni tsuite, 1925) and “Memories of Earthquake Barracks” (Shinsai barakku no omoide, 1927), Kon redefines barracks in opposition to primitive huts (koya).27 While the hut, an improvement over the simple shelter, remains part of a passive, isolated, and self-sufficient natural economy relying exclusively on the materials provided by the surrounding environment (milieu), the barracks is the mark of a later stage of social organization. As society reaches a threshold of complexity, the barracks emerges as a temporary dwelling form in an economy of exchange (ryūtsū keizai), with the basic function of supporting the dweller’s labor activities. The barracks as temporary dwelling place is celebrated by Kon Wajirō as the minimal form of urban dwelling because it allows for the liberation and channeling of creativity in the making of one’s own dwelling place, the barracks, and the modern capital of Japan. This narrative is at odds with Yanagita Kunio’s narrative of urban modernization, where it is the premodern nagaya that ensures the link between hut and modern dwelling. Yanagita’s narrative is one of increasing alienation allowed by the segregation of dwelling places, even within the family where each is given a room of their own—except for the housewife.28 More than a provisional solution to a postapocalyptic state of emergency, the barracks gives form to the spatiotemporal economy of modern urban dwelling, an economy defined in terms of production, consumption, and exchange in a colonialist relation to the world. For the barracks is akin to a military and colonial base (kichi) from which can be imagined and projected

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Figure 5.4  Barracks in Front of the Imperial Palace (September 9, 1923). Kōgakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive.

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an improved architecture of dwelling in the future. Kon Wajirō quotes the “Standard Dictionary” (no reference is provided) to propose a provisional definition of the barracks: 1. Permanent structure for the lodgment of soldiers, as distinguished from a hut or tent; generally in the plural. 2. A temporary or rough building or a number of huts in an enclosure, serving as a shelter for a company of laborers or the like.29 The attitude toward the environment is here one akin to colonialism. The external appearance of the barracks is always transcended by its value as kichi, which implies a necessary idea of progress, the improvement of living conditions based on the colonization of one’s surroundings in a process of expansion (kakuchō). In “Memories of Earthquake Barracks,” Kon uses the concept of “dwelling standard” (hyōjun jūtaku): for a given situation, the desirable standard of living to be achieved, defined in terms of surface of habitation, cost, and quality of construction materials. The actual barrack is necessarily inferior to the ideal “dwelling standard,” because the urban dweller accepts the necessity to endure an inferior condition of everyday life in order to allow for the increase of activities of production. As Kon explains, “barrack” (I use the term in the singular to emphasize the singularity of the barrack as form) is the name given to “this particular house, not any common building, built by people engaged in a given labor who, taking as their prior goal the accomplishment of this labor (or in light of a specific economic conjuncture), willingly endure for the time being this state of living.”30 This formulation implies that the barrack is not so much an actual building (habitat) but is first a dwelling practice (habiter). Nor is the barrack characteristic only of an exceptional situation, such as the devastations of an earthquake or war: it is an answer to the singular economic situation constitutive of the everyday condition of the modern urban dweller. While it is to be a temporary answer, it is clear in Kon’s narrative of modern society that there is no overcoming the barrack if society is to keep evolving. For this willingly accepted restriction of the standard of living is precisely what liberates the creative forces of urban dwellers, in their desire to attain the ideal “dwelling standard.” The barrack thus opens a territory whose consistency is defined by the tension between a present condition of dwelling, a desired dwelling standard, and an external relation with a series of milieus providing the materials for the making of the dwelling place itself. The barrack is not a space of interiority, the bourgeois domus opposed to the exterior space of the street; it is instead a surface of passage between milieus, a barrack, and an ornament. There is

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therefore an obvious complicity of the barrack with the structure of desire of modern commodity exchange, for the “dwelling standard” is by definition an unrealizable ideal. Achieving the “dwelling standard” would mean a return to the self-sufficient autarchic life in the hut, a possibility explicitly rejected by Kon’s narrative of modern urban society. The “dwelling standard” is the horizon of urban dwelling beyond which a new territory emerges along with another “dwelling standard” that conditions the internal dynamic of the new dwelling place. It is this combined movement of protention and retention that allows for the emergence of dwelling places in urban modernity. The movement from dwelling place to dwelling place is itself oriented by a sense of progress—the desired march toward knowledge, specialization, and functionality—but always suspended in an intermediary state, never fully realized. And it is precisely this suspense that liberates the expressive qualities of the barracks. The barrack and the ornament are brought together by the logic of recycling that defines the attitude of the modern urban dweller as both producer and consumer. Contrary to the primitive hut, barracks are built by recycling materials produced for entirely different purposes. Poles, pipes, and grave poles are deprived of their initial function and turned into the heteroclite building blocks of a dwelling. Recycling is the mode of production of the barrack, and it is as well a mode of consumption that combines the reduction of diverse objects toward a pure function (a more radical process of abstraction than engineered architectures of dwelling made of homogeneous building blocks) with the secondary release of unintended aesthetic effects. In short, a socialized bricolage—socialized because grounded in the historical movement of emergence and disappearance of dwelling places. Among the many examples given by Kon, we can find the original patterns of barracks roofs resulting from the combination of haphazard materials with coal tar and recalling farmhouse roofs. Rural roof patterns are reintegrated into a larger urban movement to become just another possible actualization of the barrackornament (figure 5.5). As Kon Wajirō, Yoshida Kenkichi and others surveyed post-earthquake barracks, they organized themselves into an avant-garde artistic movement working for the beautification of Tokyo streets, the Barracks Decoration Company (Barakku sōshokusha).31 In opposition to the White Birch Society (Shirakaba-ha), with its aesthetic theories privileging the spirit of the individual artist and/or human universal creativity,32 the Barracks Decoration Company advocated a more complex relation between built architecture and urban experiences, one where the ornament took central stage. As Gennifer Weisenfeld remarks, “Kon felt that this playful, effervescent aesthetic was

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Figure 5.5  Barrack Covered in Coal Tar. Kōgakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive.

a legitimate response to the liberated space of the barracks.”33 The Barrack Decoration Company was a short-lived experiment; the company was disbanded in March 1924 and its realizations only survived in the form of photographs and verbal accounts. The close relation between the barracks and the ornament does however recur in the 1927 article “Memories of Earthquake Barracks”: “Originally, the house is a house, the signboard a signboard, and each is made separately. But in the construction of earthquake barracks, both were combined together”34 (see figure 5.6). It is this disjunctive synthesis of the house and the signboard, of the barracks and the ornament, that presents an answer to the question of dwelling in modern Tokyo, bringing together utility and pleasure. In this respect, as Fujimori Terunobu and others have stressed, Yoshida Kenkichi should be credited for having produced the first actual work of Modernologio: a study of signboards in post-1923 Tokyo.35 And yet, the name “Kon Wajirō” is (as I have noted on several occasions) a collective one. Rather than an origin story, then, it makes more sense to understand Fujimori’s statement as a first intuition of this form of the barrack-ornament. The barrack-ornament as a form circulating across urban places allows for unexpected encounters with beauty, what Kon calls “accidental beauty” (gūzen na utsukushisa).36 Accidental beauty reveals the poietic quality of

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Figure 5.6  New Barrack Style. Kōgakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive.

post-1923 everyday life emerging in the tension between utilitarianism and aestheticism, between consumption as production recycling and consumption as aesthetic appreciation of the dwelling form in its time and place. Thus if it is consumption that defines modern societies, as Kon argues, it is a form of consumption that is not simply based on the liberation of objects from need, production, and reproduction, as Kon had initially argued in his theory of modernology. For survival remains a central issue, albeit now a modern one. It is not premised on the economy of the hut, only aiming at the satisfaction of basic biological needs, but on that of the barrack, which allows for planning, imagining, and staying in place for a time, to “shelter the time of everyday life.” Consumption becomes here a split process feeding on itself, of consumption as production in a movement of abstraction based on the uprooting and reduction of a multiplicity of objects, and of the consummation of this very process in a transitory aesthetic form, an ornament. The barrack introduces a sense of limit to define a dwelling territory in relation to both other places and the open spectacle of speed that becomes Tokyo. This limit, both relative in relation to other urban places and absolute in relation to the virtual whole of the urban planetary, allows for a curving of both the tendency toward homogenization and functionalism, the movement

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toward the realization of abstract space described by Henri Lefebvre, and the drive toward absolute fragmentation and chaos, the two sides of the new in modernity, and Kon’s two polarities. This curving liberates a surface of expression, opening the barrack to the ornament. We should then understand Kon’s barrack-ornament as both a dwelling form and a method to learn to see and dwell in the urban everyday.

How to Dwell in Tokyo? The opening section of the New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo entitled “Tokyo Overture” (Tōkyō jokyoku) gives us a historical narrative of Tokyo in line with the evolution of Kon Wajirō’s urban thought since his 1917 essay “Basic Directions on Urban Re-development” discussed in the previous chapter. It is a standard modernist narrative of progress, telling how the end of feudal society brought by the Meiji Revolution and the introduction of Western things allowed for the liberation of the national people (minshū). “Today’s Tokyo” was born in 1914, the day of the inauguration of Tokyo station in what used to be called Mitsubishigahara, an empty lot bought in 1890 by Mitsubishi. In only fifteen years, Tokyo station became the bustling economic center of the capital in front of the Imperial Palace and at the heart of the business district of Marunouchi. Most importantly, Tokyo Station, now established as the center of an expanding national railway network, became a monument of this city of movement, telling of the continuous rise of new centers as the urban moves ever forward and outward, and turned Musashino into a sea of roofs and chimneys.37 The urban metaphors used in these introductory pages are revealing of a fascination for the urban, a fascination that does not start with the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Tokyo appears in those pages as a monster, an organism that absorbs its surroundings in a constant movement of concentration and expansion. This view of modern urban space as an organic milieu resonates with Henri Lefebvre’s notion of differential space rather than abstract space as such. As I will argue, the tension between totalization and fragmentation in Kon’s work cannot be understood in terms of the aporia of abstract space, the modernist opposition between a panoramic view and a multiplicity of fragments of everyday life, or the aporia of the modern alienated subject. A different urban subject emerges from the pages of this guidebook, in touch with a different quality of everydayness defined by transit, ongoing movement, and change in an open totality. The Tokyo dweller is however only connected to a series of fragments of the city, which never add up to a total knowledge of the city. At the same time, the guidebook argues that it is this very ignorance of the totality of

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experiences which allows the Tokyo dweller to dwell in this space, if only in passing: “Actually one can only dwell in Tokyo if one is not stressed to the same degree as the whole of the municipality of Tokyo is. Should a fool desire to suddenly experience today’s Tokyo in his individual head, he would surely be destroyed.”38 The movement of modern urban space conditions this tactic of survival whereby one only experiences a series of disconnected urban fragments without ever accessing, nor in fact wishing to access, the totality of stimuli that constitutes Tokyo. What defines Tokyo as an urban center, the central area of Tokyo in the text quoted earlier, is an almost inhuman level of circulation and concentration of stimuli that threatens to push the individual beyond their constitutional limits. Tokyo is an urban center of experiences defined by the intensity of affects that move the urban dweller in such a way that its totality can only be approached indirectly through a fragmented experience that allows one to preserve the integrity of one’s being. This indirect approach is in itself a process of abstraction in a situation of survival, trying to figure out how to preserve the integrity of one’s being in a situation of ongoing change, acceleration, and intensification of local experiences. It is a modal process of abstraction that remains embedded in its historical moment. The danger, however, is a hardening of the individual turned into a mechanical doll, insensitive to any external stimuli, a cog in the wheel— unmoved, unaffected, blasé. For this reason, the guidebook and modernology in general attempted to articulate a mobile dwelling form that could shelter the subjectivity of the Tokyo dweller without numbing it, in a stuplime exposure to an urban spectacle of speed. And as the passage quoted earlier suggests, only an embodied knowledge of Tokyo would allow for a safe grasp of this whole, an open totality rooted in local everyday experiences. “So, who is the Tokyo dweller?” the guidebook asks. “None other than that guy who wanders the roads and backstreets, looking for tags of houses or rooms to rent, that is, it’s the one always trying to decide on a place to live in.”39 In 1929, 80 percent of the population of Tokyo is composed of renters who for the most part enter the capital at Tokyo station.40 The Tokyo dweller, like Spivak’s planetary human, lives on rent,41 in borrowed space and time, in a place essentially foreign because defined by movement and change. Is then the Tokyo dweller desired by the 1929 guidebook a re-empowered subject of agency, creating through consumption a dwelling place in the carefree manner of the postmodern urban flâneur, or perhaps a well-educated, budget-managing housewife? Kon flirts with both options, none providing a satisfying answer. For one problem comes first: the Tokyo dweller does not have a proper grasp of Tokyo as a whole, that is, as an ongoing spectacle

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of movement and speed; Tokyo is too much, too intense, too big for that. “If asked ‘how is such and such part of Tokyo?’ too often I can’t give a proper answer.”42 The situation has not really changed today. Yet for Kon, access to a whole if open image of Tokyo is the condition sine qua non for generating a proper urban subjectivity. The urban subject chooses as much as he is chosen by his dwelling place in a reciprocal process of answering to the milieu he is passed through. Although gendered male, he (kare in the earlier quote) is really a posthuman life form potentially male, female, machine, doll, animal, student, criminal, Marxist, modern girl, or student. The urban dweller is a polymorphous perverse who will take the shape appropriate to their dwelling space and its accompanying sociological categories. As the traveler of “General Directions in Urban Planning,” the Tokyo dweller is offered a large range of options for deciding on a dwelling place: Western-style or Japanese-style apartments, the bustling urban areas of Ginza or Shinjuku, or a quieter suburb. If they do not like their surroundings, they just have to move to another place. The urban dweller is in constant movement, from place to place; forcing Kon’s argument, if there is a dwelling place to find, it is in a mobile form circulated in the surfaces of the Japanese capital. The first chapter thus presents the long history of the capital ending in post-1923 Tokyo. The keyword is progress (shinkō), for the aim of the guide is not simply to localize and orient the readership toward places of consumption but first to educate them by revealing the invisible historical movement of Tokyo, the specific mode of production that determines urban dwelling experiences. Kon argued for an oriented evolution that allowed for continuous change, differentiation, and appreciation of urban life and customs. This would correspond to the age of “neo-techniques” redefined by Kon as the age of rationality, opening onto a multiplicity of urban experiences in a safe and functional space of urban consumerism. Kon thus first defined Tokyo in terms of movement and production in order to, in a second moment, return to the question of consumption and dwelling in the second and third parts of the guidebook. Kon thus stayed one step ahead of the moment of value extraction, at the surface of everyday practices, to examine this urban experience of dwelling that I call a “dwelling in transit.” This is a critical take on the classical Marxist distinction between use and exchange value, since here, it is use value that emerges at the surface to endlessly compose a figure of dwelling, while exchange value is the hidden ground brought to the surface to be relativized in the third moment of modernology that follows data collection and analysis, that is, comparison. Comparison of everyday dwelling places allows for a better understanding of the hybrid reality of the modern urban everyday by first enabling a shift from formal distinctions

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between closed ensembles, always indexed on the national territory and moved by the desire for the lost home, to modular distinctions between places always emerging and leaking into each other. Chapter 2, “The Face of Tokyo,”43 asks the reader to imagine what could be the face presented by the capital to its dwellers or visitors. “What expression is she presenting to the Tokyo dweller or Tokyo visitor? Is she smiling, or showing the sour face of one who bit on a bitter insect?”44 The close-up on the urban surface shows us an affective landscape, both smiling and bitter, and feminine. This anthropomorphization and feminization of Tokyo is a self-conscious gesture that shows the perspicacity of Kon’s analysis of urban space. Works on the modern woman have stressed how, during the Taishō era, debates on urban life centered on the feminization of urban space and the emergence of new female types, such as the high school girl, the moga (modern girl), the professional working woman, and the middleclass housewife. Barbara Sato in particular has discussed the emergence of the modern woman in relation to urban consumerism.45 Building on Marxist social critique and writer Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, she argues that “consumerism furnished new resources for redefining the lives of urban middle-class women,” in short, “the emergence of agency.”46 And as Hirabayashi and others emphasized, agency requires education: the modern urban dweller needs to be educated in urban life and learn to see an ordered face in the midst of a chaotic movement. In this chapter, then, Kon first presents us with an image of Tokyo neat and ordered, the image of a space moving forward on a path of modernization structured by a transport system connecting the various centers of the city, each defined by a specific function, work, leisure, or rest, thus reflecting developments in urban planning since the implementation of the 1919 Law on Urban Planning.47 Along with the completion of the Yamanote line in 1919 and the expansion of private railways into the western near-suburb, subcenters arose spontaneously at the junction of private lines, mostly in Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Ikebukuro. These places of transit between places of work and living added up to an increasing diversification and fragmentation of everyday urban experiences. The quantitative and functional change brought about by the expansion and complexification of the transport system generated a qualitative change in the nature of urban places themselves. Everything is in order to compose the city’s landscape in the image of a smiling woman— everything, that is, but the transport system itself, exploded into a multiplicity of unregulated transport modes in competition with each other. Not only the public railway (shōsendensha or shōden) after the completion of the “no” of the Yamanote line in 1925 but also the tram (160,000 passengers a day), the

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post-earthquake Entarō (trucks used for public transportation), private buses, subways (opened in 1927), one-yen taxis (entaku) fiercely competing with Meiji rickshaws (jinrikisha)—and not only on land but also on water, with the one-sen steam boats (issen shōki) shuttling back and forth on the Sumida river, and even in the air after the creation of Japan Air Transport (Nihon kōkū yusō kabushigaisha) in 1928. The composed image of the beautiful modern woman disseminated at the surfaces of Tokyo in women’s magazines— boarding trains, driving trucks, posing as a mannequin in show windows, working as a typist, office lady, elevator girl, or nurse—is itself exploded into a multiplicity of figures provoking both attraction and pleasure, along with anxiety, if not outright repulsion.48 It is the transport system, in particular the new promiscuity of bodies in the train, that became the site of concentration of such desires and anxieties for women, from Tayama Katai’s 1907 short story “Girl Watching” (Shōjobyō, literally the Girl Disease) to Mori Ōgai’s 1911 “The Street Car Window” (Densha no mado) or Kobayashi Takiji’s 1924 “The Ticket-Taker” (Kaisatsu-gakari).49 The face of Tokyo emerges in close-up as an intense surface of affect circulation, barely held together by a patchwork of urban infrastructures and unfinished urban planning projects.50 The smiling beauty is always at risk of decomposition into a sour face barely holding herself together in the face of Tokyo’s intensive degree of everyday stimulation. And if anything makes the face hold, it is a logic of the ornament. For Kon, these changes are not a problem as such, certainly not the feminization of urban space, which retains, at this moment in his work, a queer dimension. Then, it was a question of multiplying the entry points into the hybrid spectacle of speed of the Japanese capital, to articulate within a rational dwelling form a local image of movement, a barrack and an ornament, a barrack-ornament. The barrack-ornament is by definition temporary, indexed on today’s accepted standard for a good life. At the same time, this standard is always driven by a movement of extension and improvement (kakuchō) for a better life into the future: it is modular, like a cosmic shell. In this respect, the temporal logic of the barrack-ornament is not exactly that of Lévi-Strauss’ bricolage or Siegfried Kracauer’s mass ornament.51 Bricolage as defined by Lévi-Strauss entails the reduction of a limited and heterogeneous set of elements to the ahistorical and closed totality of a mythical system, in short the erasure of historicity, not just linear chronological time but also history as pure contingency, as event. In the barrack-ornament, however, the process of abstraction, if based on rationality, results in a hybrid dwelling form that preserves both the historicity of its elements and of their temporary assemblage. This is precisely what allows for the aesthetic effect of ornamentation.

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The barrack-ornament is also different from Siegfried Kracauer’s concept of the mass ornament, although it shares similar questions. Both Kon and Kracauer were concerned with the fragmented nature of urban experiences and the possibility of a figure of the urban everyday in which would reside the truth of its historical time. For both, access to this figure of the everyday had to be mediated by a rationality that could overcome the homogenizing forces of abstraction in order to “find rational insights corresponding to the particularity of each situation.”52 Their answers, however, diverged. Kracauer defined the mass ornament as “the aesthetic reflex of the rationality aspired to by the prevailing economic system,” namely of a Fordist economy based on alienation of the subject: a closed totality. The mass ornament was for Kracauer an empty form that, like the empty abstraction of the nation-state, reproduced itself in the desire for the lost home, the domus. Kracauer’s solution was to pass through the ornament and, recovering a full rationality, realize the potential of the human. Kon’s answer was opposite. Instead of desiring to overcome the contradictions of a local situation, he attempted rather to further enter the urban spectacle in order to reopen local experiences to their planetary, urban, and cosmic (un)ground in its moment of emergence, in the everyday use of things. This solution resonates with present discussions about the planetary as return to the Earth and the local, what I call the intensification of the local.53 The ornament never becomes the expression of a closed, homogeneous, and hegemonic system reproducing the alienation of a modern subject: it is instead the local expression of a planetary situation in a dwelling form, the barrack-ornament.

Urban Monsterology In chapter 3, “Moving Tokyo,” Kon provides a textbook success story of Tokyo that, building on Edo early capitalist experiments and Meiji modernization, has reemerged fully clothed from the 1923 disaster. This is teleological history in its crudest form, all forces of the Japanese nation conspiring for the greater good of the Japanese capital. The narrative is wellknown, unremarkable—but it unfolds in an original form. For the success story of Tokyo, reborn from the ashes of the 1923 disaster and reaching the level of a world city on equal footing with New York, Paris, and London, relocalizes Tokyo within a movement of planetary urbanization where the national is no longer the starting point but rather a secondary effect, an architecture. Movement in post-1923 Tokyo is articulated by a series of urban architectures: political institutions (the administrative buildings of the government, hospitals, barracks, prisons), business centers (the Kabuto-chō

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stock exchange established in 1878, the finance center of Marunouchi in front of the Tokyo station with its banks and office buildings), centers of production and distribution (wholesalers and markets, factories, the Kiba lumberyard), along with those modern centers of consumption, department stores. A planetary urban movement is here partially captured and reoriented for the reproduction of the national center of Japan as a space of circulation of goods, people, information, and affects. The capture is, again, incomplete, as Kon shows by introducing in the guidebook the dimension of production in relation to consumption and affect, what Deleuze and Guattari call production of consumption and production of distribution.54 “Short-haired young women in skirts walk the plane tree-lined pavement. One can see the faces of young typists at the windows of the buildings. And as the evening comes, the endless human wave of salary men vomited from the buildings.”55 The monuments of modern finance capitalism concentrated in the Marunouchi area in downtown Tokyo are described as a little office town, a microcosm. Here, what Kon calls “Monster Marubiru”56 consumes urban dwellers reduced to the regulated movement of masses of workers in the national center of production and consumption. Kon’s strategy for engaging with the monstrous place of global finance capitalism consists in foregrounding the materiality of its spaces of production (of capital) and consumption (of workers but also cigarettes and newspapers) and territorializing Marunouchi by giving it a name, “Monster Marubiru,” that imposes a sense of limits and proportions. For example, the Mitsui Bank: “One marble column costs 10,000 yen, and there are 83 such standing pillars crowding this space. So if someone wants to touch 10,000 yen, he just has to gently approach and stroke a column.”57 Although it is not possible to represent this local environment generated by global finance capitalism, one can feel its force by observing not only the movement of salaried workers but also the monuments of American-style capitalism58 with their “buildings cut by a straight line of high windows”—or by touching the marble pillars of the Mitsui Bank. The haptic sensation at the contact of the marble pillar relocalizes the urban subject passing through the monstrous landscape of Marunouchi office town in a bounded and secured territory. And the accumulation of numerical data gives form to the monstrous movement of Marunouchi and contains it temporarily inside a territory habitable by the Tokyoite, a sort of miniature. The same process is repeated in the case of department stores. The department store is, as the saying goes, “the miniature of a living city.”59 It is a sort of monad, a monstrous miniature. Mitsubishi, Shirokiya, Matsuzakaya: every day each modern department store of the capital hosts the population of an entire rural city, functioning as an organic

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whole regulated by the exchange of commodities and the global flows of capital. Gathering and orienting the movement of goods, people, and affects, these gigantic monsters are consistent and self-controlled wholes emerging at the intersection of a series of urban movements. Office buildings, banks, and department stores are both monument and building, monstrous hybrids that gather in a singular place a totality of urban experiences and redefine urban dwelling as a transitory place, a consistent whole always exposed to an urban milieu and leaking from all parts. These buildings are the modern monuments of global capital. As Henri Lefebvre explains, monumentality used to gather all the moments of spatiality. The monument effected in premodern times a consensus made practical and concrete, as for example with European churches or, in the Japanese case, the temple complex of Nikkō, west of Tokyo, the Tokugawa castle keep (Tenshukaku) and multiple waygates that controlled access to Edo.60 On the other hand, “buildings, the homogeneous matrix of capitalistic space, successfully combine the object of control by power with the object of commercial exchange. The building effects a brutal condensation of social relationships”61 leading in modernity to the establishment of an illusory homogenization of space. In a reversal of the relation between the monument and the building, “buildings and dwelling-places have been dressed up in monumental signs: first their façades, and later their interiors.”62 This can easily be observed in administrative buildings, schools, city halls, ministries— the cornerstones of modern guidebooks like the 1884 Tokyo Guide for Lone Travelers or the 1907 Tokyo Guide. In Tokyo, these buildings are built in Western style, as with the red-brick Mitsui Headquarters in Marubiru. Those buildings stand out as so many islands, and become landmarks of the new political regime. Thus “Society—that is, capitalist society—no longer totalizes its elements, nor seeks to achieve such a total integration through monuments. Instead it strives to distill its essence into buildings.”63 Monumentality becomes a surface effect of the ideology of the lost home and the family state, a varnish that presents an illusion of stability in the midst of chaotic urban movement. According to Lefebvre, “When the subject—a city a people—suffers dispersal, the building and its functions come into their own; by the same token, residence [l’habitat] prevails over dwelling [l’habiter].”64 The fragmentation of the social in urban modernity allows for the reduction of dwelling places to a function of social reproduction supervised by the state, a state that in Japan defines itself as a family state (kazoku kokka). This is true—and this is not the whole story. In fact, Lefebvre’s later work on rhythmanalysis was moving beyond this limited understanding of urban dwelling by reintroducing a sense of aesthetics and pleasure.65

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However, although in late-nineteenth-century Europe, the beautiful, particularly in ornamentation, became subversive of “society marred by nascent commodification,”66 Kon’s ornamentalism is not exactly deployed “as a political weapon against a complacent Victorian Bourgeois society,” as Jameson put it.67 There is a concern for social transformation, of course, for the betterment of everyday life but not for radical social change in a nostalgic or revolutionary mode. This might be why the guidebook never pretends to give a total view of Tokyo, a cathartic image that could pacify the movement of planetary urbanization. Such a view would either reproduce the alienation of the modern subject or lead us straight into madness. Rather, Kon relocalizes urban dwelling experiences in the movement between ordered wholes, that is, between temporary shelters held together in Marubiru between monument and building. What is monstrous then is precisely the impossibility of containing the movement of urban places in place, as if it had a life of its own. Georges Canguilhem, and later his student Michel Foucault, argued that monstrosity is a challenge to social norms. However, monsters for Canguilhem must be organic things, living things: “We must reserve the qualification ‘monster’ for organic beings. There are no mineral monsters. There are no mechanical monsters.”68 Is this to say then that the urban cannot be called monstrous or that Canguilhem was just short-sighted in his definition? The answer is: neither. First, we should be wary of the fascination for the mechanical and instead think the urban as a machinic environment, think urban places as assemblages. Second, the urban is a form of life, and as I show in the last part of this chapter when discussing the Chicago school of urban studies, there is a long and influential history of urban thought as organicism. This approach has been rightly criticized for its vague use of biological metaphors and in particular for relying on the image of a closed city as opposed to a new life form, which is precisely what Kon engages with in a constructivist mode. “By the late 1920s, Kon was fully dedicated to capturing the theatrics of ‘architecture outside of architecture,’ of the modern moment in all its multiplicity.” This new attitude shows for Miriam Silverberg Kon’s acknowledgment that “a new, fluid system was under construction” where now-reified binary oppositions, like East and West, did not yet refer to essential (or national) differences.69 Rather, the cultural label constituted an attempt to articulate a multiplicity of hybrid practices of consumption in post-1923 urban culture. Kon’s descriptions thus move from architectures of movement, pleasure, and speed to spaces of consumption. As places of entertainment, urban hotels are ordered in a series of categories (ryokan, student pensions, modern hotels, etc.), each catering to a particular clientele

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in transit. Following the exploration of new urban architectures, the eleventh part of the guidebook, entitled “Tokyo Everyday Life,” attempts to figure the dwelling form appropriate to those new urban practices in the rented apartment, mirroring the post-earthquake barracks. The barrack-ornament becomes the paradigmatic urban dwelling form, able to generate new dwelling experiences in a space of surfaces populated by mannequins, modern girls and Marxist boys dancing to the sound of jazz, and brokers. Kon’s studies break down individual bodies into ornamental series of hats, ties, and postures, focusing on everyday practices rather than on a unified subject of practice. As Silverberg argues, “Unlike de Certeau, he [Kon] did not concern himself with the consciousness of the urban practitioners (whom de Certeau terms blind) to the varied motions in their urban space. He did not investigate how choices are considered.”70 Rather than a modern individual, the only subject that articulates these series of partial objects and partial subjects becomes the movement of, in, and through urban places made visible in singular dwelling territories, of which the ethnographer is as much a distant observer as an immediate participant.71 The urban subject is then not exactly the bystander detached from the spectacle and arrested on the brink of action, nor is it essentially defined by the question of choice or consciousness. It is first a subject of place who has learned how to see and in seeing how to dwell—a voyant.

The Planetary Spectacle of Urban Speed The Chicago School of urban studies that was emerging at the time of Kon’s work was also trying to find answers to the question of urban mobility and spatial determinism. Building on Simmel’s characterization of the urban subject in terms of mobility, anonymity, and temporary social relations (i.e., the dialectic of distance and proximity, blasé attitude and use of rationality), Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, Roderick McKenzie, and Louis Wirth tried in the 1920s to grasp the spatial order of modern cities, starting with Chicago. While their work has drawn virulent criticism for its tendency toward geographical determinism (especially in the succeeding appropriation of their works by federal and municipal bureaucracies), their writings emphasized the moving reality of urban space and the mobility of its inhabitants.72 Burgess’ concentric schema of Chicago has been decried for its oversystematization and naive understanding of spatial dynamics, remaining at the level of description without engaging with the actual impact of socioeconomic dynamics73—a criticism in much the same vein as that levied by Tosaka Jun against Kon Wajirō, that is, a matter of production.74

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Yet as Yves Graftmeyer and Isaac Joseph remark, Burgess’ schema in fact relied on a complex conception of mobility resonating with Park’s and Wirth’s emphasis on the importance of thinking together mobility, situation, and dwelling. As Wirth argued, access to mobility and the freedom to choose one’s place of residence is obviously class determined. He thus opposed one class—cosmopolitan artists, intellectuals, and young couples who, freely deciding on their dwelling place, instantiate the sovereign urban subject— to a population of “ethnic villagers” who, without access to material and intellectual resources, lived by obligation in urban places and are subjected to the primary mode of life of the village community.75 As Chad Heap shows, there is a moralist bias in these studies that ends up associating mobility with deviance, particularly marginal sexual practices.76 Yet despite this conservative view of Chicago sociologists, Park and Burgess’s pioneering research in urban practices made clear that for them “the city was as much a sexual laboratory as a social one.”77 Building on this insight and recent work by Matthew Gandy, it becomes clear that the urban is not only a space of production and reproduction, or only secondarily so. The urban in a planetary situation is, first, an ongoing space of movement and deformation in place leaking from all sides, a queer space where one is circulated and dwells on rent, in short, a space of distribution. For urban dwelling is not about having but about learning the cues to dwell in transit, within a spectacle of speed. Instability, or rather mobility, is the norm in modern urban space and must be understood in three senses: between urban areas; inside a given urban area; and in-place without changing one’s place of living.78 It is this last sense that is central to Kon’s take on modern urban dwelling experiences. For what makes an experience of place a dwelling experience implies obviously more than just renting a place. As we saw with “Basic Directions on Urban Re-development,” the urban place is first defined by its movement of affects, the intensity of stimuli resulting from the movement of partial objects and partial subjects in a given place. The urban dwelling form is thus a degree zero of movement: leaps in place. The chapter on Tokyo places of entertainment (sakariba) is particularly revealing in this respect.79 The population of popular entertainment districts (Ningyōchō, Dōgenzaka, Shinjuku, Ueno, Kagurazaka, Ginza, Asakusa) is presented in six graphs, on the basis of a series of more or less conventional sociological categories of analysis (figure 5.7). The population itself is divided in two halves, female and male, and then each half in seven subcategories, with minor differences for each place analyzed (e.g., geisha, soldiers, and provincials are sometimes absent). Each entertainment district is defined by a nameplate, the train station channeling the main flow of people,

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Figure 5.7  Survey of Ginza and Asakusa September 1929 at 4 p.m. Top: Ginza. Bottom: Asakusa. From left to right, geisha, maid (female), kids (girl), female students, daughters, housewives, old women, old men, middle-age men, young men, male students, kids (boy), workers, clerks, soldiers (original edition).

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a tension between diurnal and nocturnal movement, and a unique historical atmosphere. Ginza is the modern entertainment district par excellence, with its modern boys and girls, its department stores—in short, the mecca of urban consumerism emerging from the 1923 earthquake and the age of barracks. However, the logic of the barrack is here replaced by an opposition between bright façades and back streets, the latter open to the strolling of Tokyoite (ginbura) reminiscent of Kafū’s own urban strolling. Asakusa and Ningyōchō are both associated with plebeian Shitamachi. Asakusa in particular is defined by stagnation (teitai) and urban masses (gunshū), with no marked differences between seasons. It is the number one entertainment area of Japan, enjoyed during the day by families coming from all parts of Tokyo and Japan and at night by a more adult crowd with different interests. “Stagnation” is an interesting term, because it qualifies the masses of Asakusa as both old-fashioned or conservative and also passionate, as both ready for the new and for discarding it immediately. Ueno is “the north gate to the capital,” the crossing point of eight train lines, offering a clear view of the spectacle of movement of the capital, from its trains to trucks, entaku, buses, bicycles, and urban strollers.80 To the pleasing entertainment of Ueno (Ueno no yūraku), Shinjuku opposes its continuous flow of people. Where Ueno and Tokyo station are the two front gates of the capital, Shinjuku is its back door, a place of transit for the western suburbans as well as people coming from chūbu (the central mountainous region of Japan) and ura-nihon (back-Japan, on the Japan sea).81 How is place—here a place of entertainment—defined? What makes it singular, gives it color, and makes it a dwelling place? As I have argued in this chapter, urban dwelling does not follow the model of centrality of the domus. It is by definition temporary, which gives it a specific quality of space and time marked by the logic of the barrack and the ornament. The consistency of the urban dwelling place, as much for the modern apartment as for the sakariba or the back streets of Honjo and Fukagawa, is given by the circulation of people. It is the circulation of individuals as both partial subjects and partial objects that expresses a singular quality of place with its own duration, its own historicity, always in relation to other urban places as well as the whole of Tokyo. What must be stressed here, though, is that this is premised on the possibility of a continuous movement of the urban dweller in and between dwelling places, that is, on the existence of modern infrastructures of transportation. This implies that the appeal to scarcity (selflimitation of one’s quality of living) and pleasure (accidental beauty) only makes sense if the urban dweller is detached from any fixed position, be it the domus or the god-like view of the urban planner. And this is allowed by the

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modern space of commodity exchange opened by the transport system, just as the whole guidebook itself is structured by the movement of the train from station to station, starting with Tokyo station. Kon opens the final section on everyday life with the modern apartment, based for him on the model of the Dōjunkai apartments built after the 1923 earthquake to provide housing to the capital’s population.82 While the development of the suburb remains almost completely unregulated and in the hands of private transport companies, the Dōjunkai apartments are considered one major step in the improvement of the everyday conditions of living of urban dwellers. Established in May 1924, the Dōjunkai foundation (Mutual Prosperity Association) was first in charge of building barracks for the earthquake survivors, before turning to larger experimental projects in urban dwelling. Until its dissolution in 1941, the Dōjunkai foundation played a central role in experimentation and guidance for the construction of modern housing, building a total of 5,663 units. According to the guidebook, the Dōjunkai apartments were a series of complexes of two to four stories, fireproof ferro-concrete buildings providing all the comforts of modern urban life. Targeting the new middle class as well as lower classes, they were equipped with Japanese-style tatami rooms and Western-style rooms, a kitchen with oven, closets, a dust chute, and laundry facilities on the roof. Quoting Jinnai Hidenobu on the Dōjunkai apartments: [They reflected] the experience of living in the age of the city. They overflowed with a chic peculiar to city dwellers in the age of modernism, who found enjoyment in the urban culture that was beginning its own brilliant development in these years. Although suburban expansion was also beginning to claim attention, interest in the city remained extraordinarily high.83

Dōjunkai apartments were structurally identical in one single building or groups of buildings. They define an imperative milieu that cannot be modified, in the same way infrastructures of transport ground the evolution of urban areas and the movement between and inside urban places. What makes such a place a dwelling place is its temporary nature, and the ornaments, the diverse objects placed on the floors and walls not simply to satisfy basic needs but for ornamentation, that is, the generation of a singular dwelling place expressing the everyday temporality of dwelling of the urban dweller. Like the barrack, the modern apartment is not only a provisional dwelling place but also directly relates to one’s activity of production: to rent a Dōjunkai apartment, one needed a monthly salary two times the price of the rent.84 Figures 5.8 and 5.9 take the case of the Nippori apartment of an artist to make this point.

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Figure 5.8  Empty Apartment in Nippori (original edition).

Figure 5.9  The Same Nippori Apartment Occupied by a Young Male Artist (original edition).

The structure is imperative and closed, yet it is opened to an absolute exterior by its mere nature of being a transitory dwelling place in an urban territory. Each apartment is a self-contained cell, but what allows for this quality is the transitory nature of the dwelling place—relatively, in that it is only one of the multiple dwelling places of the urban dweller, and absolutely, since it is bound to be replaced someday by another dwelling place on the basis of another “dwelling standard.” Urban dwellers are all, for Kon, renters, and the quality of dwelling of the modern apartment is not represented by the façade but rather expressed by the signboard, the plate on which is written

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the renter’s name. In opposition to traditional houses “uselessly” opened to the exterior, those apartments close with a door equipped with a lock and a nameplate clearly identifying its renter, now free to roam the streets of Tokyo without having to worry about leaving an apartment empty.85 A territory “is in fact an act” that turns a milieu component into a quality.86 The nameplate is an ornament that abstracts a functional element of the urban milieu, the “nameplate,” and turns it into a quality. By attaching a name to the nameplate, the plate becomes the signature of the apartment renter. For Deleuze and Guattari, the signature, the act of marking, is essential to the process of territorialization: “One puts one’s signature on an object as one puts a flag on a plot of land.”87 It is an act of appropriation, but the crux of their argument is that the subject does not preexist the territory. Both are constituted at the same time “through the delineation of an expressive quality.”88 In short, “the expressive is primary to the possessive.”89 Even more so than the barrack, the modern apartment emphasizes the provisional quality of urban dwelling places, not only because of the temporal logic of the barrack-ornament but also because the experience of urban dwelling is one of movement in and between urban places. The nameplate, rather than attaching the renter to their housing, in fact liberates a continuous movement between dwelling territories of the map of Tokyo. Modern apartments are temporary dwelling places, and rather than being closed spaces framing a space of interiority (the bourgeois domus), they are flat interfaces of exchange between a multiplicity of partial objects, partial subjects, and dwelling territories. The ornament, if consumed, is not limited to objects of consumption desired by the urban subject. As the walls of the modern apartment become flat interfaces liberated for the movement of partial objects that compose the subjectivity of the urban dweller, the urban subject is itself fragmented into a multiplicity of ornamental series documented in the streets of Ginza, Kōenji, and Fukagawa by Kon Wajirō and Yoshida Kenkichi. In modernology as well as in the 1929 guidebook, the individual subject circulating in Tokyo is always already a partial object, engaged in the continuous movement of ornaments defining urban places as everyday spaces of experience. The movement of ornaments, of tables, chairs, curtains, and papers in the modern apartment, resonates with the movement of hats, socks, and mustaches in the streets of Tokyo, and in that sense, the modern apartment is not opposed to the street in terms of dwelling. Rather, the urban dwelling place marks a moment at which the subject emerges, in the perspectival movement from one territory to another, in place. Kon Wajirō’s problematization of urban dwelling as a question of movement departs from Bergson’s opposition of movement as duration to a fragmented (because

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divisible) movement in space. As explained earlier, the modern urban everyday is for Kon composed of a multiplicity of elements copresent in a given milieu but pertaining to distinct historical genealogies. As such, the hybrid quality of the urban everyday does not follow the model of grafting onto a common trunk (the model of cultural essentialism in tension with cosmopolitanism), nor that of self-excluded isolated monads (the model of urban sociality celebrated by one brand of queer studies).90 In this respect, the genealogy of urban practices and urban studies I have explored in this book is at odds with the more common genealogy of the social in urban modernity, moving from Georg Simmel to Maurice Blanchot and Leo Bersani. While I do agree with and am seduced by the argument of sociality based on restraint and subtraction in what remains a copresence of singularities never subsumed in a closed totality, I do not see anything productive any longer in the modernist use of negativity, stuck in perversion. For it is now about allowing a local encounter with a queer spectacle of speed, held for an instant before leaking away. About halfway through, the chapter “Tokyo sightseeings” (Yūran no Tokyo)91 presents Tokyo as a city of activity (katsudō no tokai) whose inhabitants can now, thanks to the New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo, enjoy the spectacle of speed. Speed is all that matters, and the guidebook completely disregards reified traditions such as local festivals (matsuri) in favor of symbols of change, of new practices, before they become in turn ossified in formal practices. This attention to the spectacle of the new in its very moment of emergence is as well a fascination for the juxtaposition of multiple temporalities in the same space. Stuplimity is the affect holding together those partial objects and temporalities within a spectacle enjoyed for an instant by the Tokyo dweller. It is the spectacle of rationality at work, articulating in an absolute spectacle of speed the hybrid space of the Japanese capital. In the end, the New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo is effectively a guide to Tokyo as a national space of pleasures. Pleasure comes from the appreciation of the degree of change and progress of the capital, of movement as human activity (katsudō) gauged against an ideal of absolute control through scientific knowledge at one end and the degree zero of urban life in 1923 Tokyo. Both polarities redefine the national territory in relation to a hybrid urban space always exceeding the name Capital. Tokyo can only be celebrated as the expression of a national social life leaking in all directions. For the urban voyant emerges not in a given territory as such but in the passing between urban territories, just as the dwelling form, circulated in any-place-whatever, opens itself to the differential space of the urban planetary.

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Notes 1. Haitani Heijirō, “Kyōin no shoninkyū” [Base Salary of an Elementary School Teacher], in Nedan no Meiji, Taishou, Shōwa fūzokushi jō [Popular history of Meiji, Taisho, and Showa prices, vol. 1], Weekly Asahi (Tokyo: Asahi Bunko, 1987), 575–580. The New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo is available online at https://archive​ .library​.metro​.tokyo​.lg​.jp​/da​/detail​?tilcod​=0000000009​-00054036. 2. Dziga Vertov, “The Fifth Issue of Kinopravda” (1922), in Kinoeye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 10–11. The Man With A Movie Camera (1929) was screened in Japan in 1932 under the title This is Russia [Korega rashia da]. 3. Ishizuka Hiromichi and Ishida Yorifusa, Tokyo: Urban Growth and Planning 1868–1988 (Tokyo: Center for Urban Studies, 1988), 19. 4. For a discussion of the changing image and function of Edo (premodern Tokyo), see Carol Gluck, “The Invention of Edo,” in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Steven Vlastos (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 262–284. 5. In English, see Sonia Ryang, “The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Massacre of Koreans in 1923: Notes on Japan’s Modern National Sovereignty,” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 731–748. Allegedly, many Chinese and Okinawans were massacred as well, mistaken for Koreans and lumped together as foreign terrorists. 6. Mark Driscoll’s recent work stresses the entanglement of race, nationalism, and environmentalism. Although I do not agree with his narrative of rupture, which ends up reproducing the view of native Asian cultures invaded by the West, redefined as “climate caucasianism,” he makes a needed contribution to the field of modern Japanese cultural history that has long been seemingly unable to think beyond the national state. Mark Driscoll, The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). 7. For example, Matsuyama Iwao’s short essay “Gomunaga to warai wo buki ni shita Tōkyō hihyō” [A critique of Tokyo armed with rubber-boots and laughter], in Kon Wajirō, Shinpan dai-Tōkyō annai jō [New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo] (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1929), 367–378; the latter text hereafter NGGT. All quotes refer to the original 1929 edition. References to the Kon Wajirō Collected Works (Kon Wajirō Shū), ed. Kawazoe Noboru (Tokyo: Domes, 1971–1972), are indicated KWS followed by the volume and page number, e.g., KWS 1, 25. 8. Gaston Bachelard, “5. Shells” (1958), in Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 137. 9. Harry Harootunian, “Time’s Envelope: City/Capital/Chronotope,” Architectural Theory Review 11, no. 2 (2006): 13. 10. Fredric Jameson, “Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist,” in The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), 236 (my emphasis).

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11. Bashosei is the Japanese term for genius loci and is always associated with a fetishism of place as unchanging and essentially different because Japanese. Place in this sense is eternal and eternally different and ends up supporting the nationalist discourse of nihonjinron (theories of the Japanese or Japaneseness). However, this sense of place as eternal and unchanging does potentially undermine the claim for a national essence: in this sense, places can only be juxtaposed with each other without possibility of mediation, not even by the national. Place as bashosei is always absolutely and eternally different from any other place, without possible communication between them, within or outside of Japan, and the national state must claim to flatten these differences in order to bring them together within a domestic space of circulation that can then be presented as a national spectacle for the concert of nations. 12. Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 13. KWS 1, 13–23. 14. Fujimori Terunobu and Nakatani Reiji, “Atakamo sūsennengo no manazashide: Kōgengaku to ‘mono’ no toi” [As if looking back one thousand years later: The question of modernology and ‘things’), Gendai Shisō 47, no. 9 (2019): 14. 15. Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation (1890), trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (New York: Henry Holt, 1903). Tarde is one of Kon’s main references. 16. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth Century City (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), 39. 17. Ferguson, Paris as Revolution, 46. 18. Ferguson, Paris as Revolution, 39. 19. For a recent study of Edo Famous Places and urban guidebooks see Robert Goree, Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography in Meisho Zue in Late Tokugawa Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2020). 20. Yamamoto Mitsumasa, Edo kenbutsu to Tōkyō kankō [Edo sightseeing and Tōkyō tourism] (Kyoto: Rinkawa sensho, 2005), 120. 21. Edo travel guides (dōchūki) provided precise and up-to-date information on post stations, rivers, and control posts. 22. Yamamoto, Edo kenbutsu to Tōkyō kankō, 147–149. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Perception of Time and Space (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986 [1977]). 23. For an analysis of the relation between violence, everyday life, and Japanese politics, see Eiko Mariko Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008). Violence is of course not only the exertion of physical violence and implies equally the imposition by the Japanese state of new categories of crime and criminality and their material inscription in urban space. David Ambaras’ work, for example, is particularly revealing of the new forms of criminalization of youth in modern Japan: David Ambaras, Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of

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Everyday Life in Modern Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). 24. This guide has been republished in two volumes in 1974. Tokyo municipality, Tokyo annai (Tokyo: Meiji Bunken, 1974), available online at http://catalog​.hathitrust​ .org​/Record​/002257376. 25. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 26. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. 27. “Barakku ni tsuite” [On barracks, 1925], KWS 4, 285-298. “Shinsai barakku no omoide” [Memories of earthquake barracks, 1927], KWS 4, 299–386. 28. Yanagita Kunio, Meiji Taishō shi sesō hen (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1930–1931). 29. KWS 4, 296. 30. KWS 4, 287. 31. Yoshida Kenkichi (1897–1982) was Kon Wajirō’s main collaborator when he started getting interested into the documentation of urban customs. His relation with Kon’s work and discourse on urban customs has yet to be clearly identified—not to satisfy the claims of an author-based approach but for his distinct set of interests more clearly related to the question of performance and theatricality. As Gennifer Weisensfeld argues, Yoshida was particularly interested in the question of “signboard architecture” and also published his own sketches and analysis. I do not have the space here to properly address Yoshida’s own work, in relation to both Kōgengaku and the Tsukiji Theater, and will rather address this in another work. Gennifer Weisensfeld, MAVO: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 287. 32. Gennifer Weisenfeld’s article on the Barrack Decoration Company gives a clear and detailed account of this avant-garde movement, both its relation with other artistic movements (in particular its differences with the White Birch Society and the Bunriha architectural movement) and its practical realizations. Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Designing after Disaster: Barrack Decoration and the Great Kantō Earthquake,” Japanese Studies 18, no. 3 (1998): 229–246. Already visible here is Kon’s difference from other attempts to recover the creative spirit of the folk, either in its everyday practices or in its works of art, as seen in (respectively) Yanagita Kunio’s Folklore Studies and Yanagi Muneyoshi’s Folk Craft Movement (mingei undō), both compromised in the project of producing a national subject by arresting the movement of the urban subject. For a critical analysis of Yanagi Muneyoshi’s Folk Craft Movement, see Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 33. Weisenfeld, “Designing after Disaster,” 243. 34. KWS 4, 324. 35. Akasegawa Genpei, Fujimori Terunobu, and Minami Shinbō, Rojō kansatsugaku nyūmon [Introduction to street observation studies, 1993) (Tokyo: Chikuma Bunko, 2018), 81.

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36. KWS 4, 319. 37. NGGT 12. 38. NGGT 13. 39. NGGT 13. 40. KWS 9, 294–308. 41. “The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. It is not really amenable to a neat contrast with the globe. I cannot say ‘the planet, on the other hand.’ When I invoke the planet, I think of the effort required to figure the (im)possibility of this underived intuition.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 72. In the introduction I defined the planetary in opposition to the global, yet this is not here about a formal opposition between two exclusive spaces, dimensions, or even perspectives but rather the element of a modular tension that constantly strives to displace the global, and the national, back onto the planetary. This project is thus close to Spivak’s, although rather than traces I try to start from the planetary as an a priori situation always leaking in other directions and other places and irrespective of the national global. 42. NGGT 14. 43. “The Face of Tokyo” [Tōkyō no kao] is composed of six parts: 1. Land 2. Streets 3. Transport System 4. Buildings 5. Bridges 6. Big and Small Parks. NGGT 25–56. 44. NGGT 25. 45. Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 39. 46. Sato, The New Japanese Woman, 27. 47. A good historical analysis of this polycentrality of Tokyo can be found in Andre Sorensen’s “Subcentres and Satellite Cities: Tokyo’s 20th Century Experience of Planned Polycentrism,” International Planning Studies 6, no. 1 (2001): 9–32. In Japanese the work of reference remains Ishida Yorifusa, Nihon kindai toshi keikaku no hyakunen [One hundred years of modern Japanese urban planning] (Tokyo: Jichitai kenkyūsha, 1987). 48. The emergence of women on the urban scene as a major source of anxiety has been documented in a number of works, starting with Andreas Huyssens’ influential essay “Mass-Culture as Woman: Modernity’s Other,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–62. In the Japanese case, see, for example, Alisa D. Freedman, Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). The modern woman is presented through her many faces in the first part of the chapter on Tokyo everyday life, where she is shown at work or in coffee shops and dance halls. 49. Alisa Freedman analyzes these three stories in the first chapter of Tokyo in Transit. 50. Ishida Yorifusa, ed., Mikan to shite no tokyo keikaku: Genjitsu shinakatta keikaku no keikakushi [Tokyo urban planning as unfinished project: A history of unfinished urban planning projects] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1992).

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51. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” (1927), trans. Barbara Correll and Jack Zipes, German Critique 5 (Spring, 1975): 67–76. 52. Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” 72. 53. In the recent years, I have seen a return of the 1990s expression “glocal” in both academic and business worlds. The glocal has been dismissed, and rightly so, precisely for supporting the project of globalization and, in its name, commodifying the local for an urban subject reduced to a tourist-consumer. We see today, in 2021, the disastrous environmental and human effects of this form of globalization. Today’s “glocal” however is different, symptomatic of the intensification of the local in a planetary situation rather than only an ideological tool for capitalist globalization. 54. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 55. NGGT, 76. 56. NGGT, 75. “Marubiru” is a short for Marunouchi Building, combining the “Maru” of Marunouchi with “biru” (building). 57. NGGT, 68. 58. The modernity of Tokyo is judged here against the United States, rather than England as in Meiji, when Marunouchi was called icchō Rondon (one-mile London). 59. NGGT, 71. 60. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 220. The monumentality of European churches and Tokugawa Japan is not exactly the same, the latter being structured in terms of a polycentrality and a heterogenous space regulated by sumptuary laws in which Edo itself becomes a monument to the Tokugawa regime, as opposed to the kind of centrality of power found in Europe. The reversal of the relation between the monument and the building in East Asia, and Japan in particular, however similar has nevertheless a different effect on urban experiences, because of a different relation to past social structures in the making of a modern national culture. On the question of Edo socio-spatial structures see Thomas Looser, Visioning Eternity: Aesthetics, Politics and History in the Early Modern Noh Theatre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). On the role of waygates as monuments see Constantine Nomiko Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). On the monumentality of the Tenshukaku see William H. Coaldrake, “Edo Architecture and Tokugawa Law,” Monumenta Nipponica 36, no. 3 (1981): 256–261. 61. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 227. 62. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 223. 63. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 232. My reading of Lefebvre is idiosyncratic. Henri Lefebvre does not conceive of a planetary space other to the global space of capitalist modernity and does not see the homogenization of space in modernity as an illusion (as fake) but in terms of the operational power of an illusion of transparency. Abstract space realizes the real subsumption of the social, and the only possibility of critique and resistance resides then in everyday practices.

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As with other narratives of Western Marxism, it is only by pushing this movement of homogenization to its limit that it becomes possible to open onto a socialist differential space. While his analysis of monuments and buildings in modern urban society is right, his model of production of space does not allow him to conceive of the social as defined by both the capture of a planetary movement and its leakages. 64. I have modified the English translation that misread the original by reversing the terms “habitat” (residence) and “habiter” (dwelling). See page 257 in the original French and page 222 in the English translation. 65. The term “rhythmanalysis” is borrowed from Gaston Bachelard’s 1936 book La Dialectique de la durée [The Dialectic of Duration] (Paris: Boivin). 66. Fredric Jameson, “Transformation of the Image in Postmodernity,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern (1983–1998) (London: Verso, 1998), 134. This essay is based on a 1995 presentation in Venezuela. 67. Jameson, “Transformation of the Image in Postmodernity,” 135. 68. Georges Canguilhem, “Monstrosity and the Monstrous,” in Knowledge of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 135. This article reproduces a 1962 lecture. 69. Miriam Silverberg, “Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity,” The Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 1 (Feb. 1992): 37. The quote is from “What is Modernology?” (1931), KWS 1, 34. 70. Silverberg, “Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity,” 44. 71. Kawazoe Noboru emphasizes this aspect of Kon’s modernology, where the observer becomes a participant in the urban scene created in the act of surveying: Kawazoe Noboru, Kon Wajirō: sono kōgengaku modernologio [Kon Wajirō: This kōgengaku modernologio] (1987; reis. Tokyo: Chikuma Bunko, 2004). 72. The seminal text of the Chicago School is Robert Ezra Park, Ernest Watson Burgess, Roderick Duncan McKenzie, and Louis Wirth, eds., The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925). 73. Yves Grafmeyer and Isaac Joseph, eds., L’école de Chicago: Naissance de l’écologie urbaine [The Chicago School: Birth of urban ecology] (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), 26. This is in particular the critique of David Harvey in Social Justice and the City (1973; reis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 131–133. Harvey stresses the limit of descriptive analysis, in opposition to Engel’s earlier analysis of London slums. See Anthony W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” in Park et al., The City, 47–62. 74. Harry Harootunian, Overcome By Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 179. 75. Grafmeyer and Joseph, “Présentation,” 18. 76. Chad Heap, “The City as a Sexual Laboratory: The Queer Heritage of the Chicago School,” Qualitative Sociology 26, no. 4 (2003): 457–487. 77. Heap, “The City as a Sexual Laboratory,” 458. 78. Roderick McKenzie, “The Neighborhood: A Study of Local Life in the City of Columbus, Ohio. I,” American Journal of Sociology 27, no. 2 (Sept. 1921): 156. 79. NGGT, 103–138.

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80. NGGT, 127–130. 81. NGGT, 121–126. 82. On the Dōjunkai see André Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 131–133. For more details on Dōjunkai activities, see Ishida Yorifusa, Nihon kindai toshikeikaku no hyakunen (Tokyo: Jichitai Kenkyūsha, 1987), 166–174; also Marc Bourdier, Dōjunkai apāto genkei: Nihon kenshikushi ni okeru yakuwari (Tokyo: Hatsubaisho Seiunsha, 1992). In the last ten years, all the remaining Dōjunkai apartments have been destroyed save for the Ueno Shimo Apartments. Unsurprisingly, an architectural form that was valued in terms of newness, transience, and mobility has once more been reappropriated according to the ideology of the lost home and its concomitant drive toward monumentalization and reification. 83. Jinnai Hidenobu, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 213. 84. NGGT, 265. 85. NGGT, 264–265. 86. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 314. For a good analysis of the relation between milieu and territory see Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 19–24. There is indeed in Kon’s urban studies a certain theatricality that distinguishes him from the kind of cinematic aesthetics characteristic of other contemporary discussions of urban modernity, even in fact Vertov's Kinoeye. This claim in itself would require a longer study than the present chapter allows; for now I merely define this theatricality as, first, distinct from an aesthetic of shock and montage characteristic of modernist discussions of modern urban space and, second, the staging for an urban subject of a continuous spectacle of speed. 87. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 316. 88. Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, 20. 89. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 316. 90. Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability” (1910), trans. Everett C. Hughes, American Journal of Sociology 55, no. 3 (Nov. 1949): 254–261. Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” trans. Susan Hanson, Yale French Studies 73, Everyday Life (1987): 12–20. Leo Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising,” Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious 1, Sameness (2002): 641–656. I must however acknowledge Bersani’s evolution regarding questions of sociality, in relation to his interest in quietism and what I see as a move toward a theory of singularities. See Leo Bersani, “Shame on You,” in After Sex, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 91–109. 91. NGGT, 169–188.

v

Conclusion Wandering Lines

As Yuko Nishikawa argues, modern Japanese literature is always about the home: it is inaugurated by the crisis of domesticity generated by a shift from the premodern extended family (ie seido) to the modern nuclear family (katei) of young couples living in urban centers.1 This shift corresponds, as Yanagita Kunio and Kon Wajirō understood, to a liberation of built forms and dwelling practices, a liberation intensified by both the situation of Japan at the periphery of Western centers and the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Liberation is always as much exhilarating as it causes anxiety and distress. Early Japanese novels are all about families and individuals moving from place to place, never able to settle down and own a proper home, at least not at first. Fiction writing here precisely follows the broken trajectories of urban dwellers who do not have access to a stable container that would allow their “self” to become sovereign. The bourgeois subject is paradigmatic of one limited aspect of modernity: it was only a temporary stabilization of an urban subjectivity always in movement, transiting between dwelling places, leaking like the social that never completely becomes a container. This is why rather than boxes, walls, and holes, we should talk about points and lines, continuous movements of deformation following a line of variation: an arabesque. This required another form of writing, what I have called cartographic writing, where the map and the territory are not opposed or fused as in Borges’ story. Cartographic writing is a speculative practice of the everyday that allows one to encounter the urban planetary in place and learn to dwell 237

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in its spectacle of movement. The planetary as I explained is not an ontology; it is a situation defined by movement and change in an open totality. This is why I first thought of the urban planetary as a queer space. But we might now qualify it further as an autistic space of the sort found in Fernand Deligny’s wander lines of autistic children. Rather than schizophrenia, autism is maybe what is symptomatic of the urban planetary, a space of immediacy where the concept fits its object, a world without others that is for that all the more territorialized. The urban planetary is defined by the intensification of place and the absolute singularity of the dwelling form in all its details and modalities. A-subjective dwelling territories, sovereign dwelling forms, between lines, at the surface. More importantly, it is a space of movement, for the planet is not a closed sphere but a wandering and playful star, as suggested by the Japanese terms wakusei and yūsei.2 If anything is sovereign, it is place as it becomes a dwelling place. The planetary is precisely the situation that allows for this turning of place on itself to become a space of gestation for the urban subject as they learn to see and in seeing dwell, in passing. The urban is the apparatus for dwelling in the planetary, an apparatus that has been discussed until now mostly in terms of control, the urban boxes of bourgeois domesticity inevitably falling into the suicidal drive of the modern state. An apparatus, however, can also simply be a “frame for human action and sensibility”3 and one that can be inclusive of all life forms. But rather than frame I prefer again lines, and in particular the lines of the littoral between land and water, uneven and ever-changing lines that draw temporary dwelling places such as the Imado bridge that shelter fragile urban subjectivities in The River Sumida. I would now like to return to Kon Wajirō’s arabesques, from the Café Kirin façade to the various trails documented by the modernologists: ants wandering (figure 6.1), women shopping, suburbans circulating in their houses. Modernologists are witnesses who record and in recording testify to the passing of everyday things: they become urban dwellers, urban voyant. Orientation in place—the identification of a line of deformation, education— learning to see within an open spectacle of movement, and aesthetic play— the possibility of encountering “accidental beauty”: these define the practice of modernology from post-1923 Tokyo to postwar Street Observation Studies led by Fujimori Terunobu and Akasegawa Genpei. The postwar situation, however, was different, street observationists looking for objects that deviated from consumerist and state-driven developmentalism because they possessed “an expressive excess.”4 This is the same situation as for early modernologists, but experienced with more intensity, and now in the cracks and folds of the everyday, the deviations that open other wandering lines into the urban planetary. To conclude, I turn to an actual, built infrastructure of

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Figure 6.1  Ant Trails. Kōgakuin University, Kon Wajirō Archive.

dwelling, the first postwar public collective housing in the land-filled area of Harumi. The Harumi Danchi, officially called Harumi Collective Housing High-Rise Apartment (Harumi danchi kōsō apāto), opened in 1958 in the landfilled area of Harumi in the Tokyo Bay. Immortalized in Kawashima Yūzō’s 1962 movie Elegant Beast (Shitoyakana Kemono), this was the first high-rise collective

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housing built by Kōdan in answer to both the housing shortage rampant in the 1950s and plans for future urban expansion, in short, reconstruction and development. The Harumi Danchi symbolized the new age of high economic development after the postwar years of reconstruction, an age that called for the rationalization of urban dwelling spaces and taller urban structures. Inspired by Le Corbusier, architect Maekawa Kunio (1905–1986) designed this collective housing composed of fifteen ten-story buildings and a total of 669 apartments (2DK units of 30–40 m2—two bedrooms, dining, and kitchen) following modern principles of rationalization and functional differentiation of dwelling spaces. Harumi Danchi thus became the model of postwar urban dwelling on rented space for a nuclear-family-centered domesticity always dreaming of owning a proper home. The danchi apartment was designed as a transitionary stage toward the acquisition of a proper place, a home— transitory because rented, collective, and standardized.5 In this respect the danchi, defined by its longing for the domus, embodies the very condition of urban dwelling in passing, in continuity with post-1923 collective housing studied by Kon and his colleagues. In Elegant Beast, Kawashima Yūzō stages the drama of postwar urban everyday life, addressing all the aspects of urban dwelling examined in this book, in particular the tension between need and pleasure. The danchi apartment embodies in Kawashima’s movie both the coldness of a domestic space defined by rational calculation aiming at the satisfaction of a national desire for a better life and the unexpected possibilities of collective life and aesthetic experiences allowed by this new interior space. The main character of the movie is the modern apartment of postwar high-growth period.6 The movie opens with a frontal view of a fifth floor apartment in a ten-story building, a Noh song playing in the background. This is an impossible view that immediately calls attention to the staged and fake nature of this domestic space and its complex relation to spaces of circulation and exchange. Built in a landfilled area in the Tokyo Bay, the Harumi Danchi is an ungrounded space, disconnected from local history and community. This apartment, being cheaper than other apartments of the complex, is located in a building with no elevator, only stairs. The first image makes it seem as though the apartment gives onto the street, although there is no street, only an abyss.7 It is as such appropriate that the narrative, built around a family of liars and cheats—the Maeda family standing for the lies of postwar Japan—ends with the suicide of a middle-aged salaryman jumping from the rooftop of the building. When the movie opens, we see the Maeda parents moving furniture, a TV, and a painting, as if they were moving in or redesigning their living space. Yet this is just another performance of their domestic life, another staging.

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Kawashima’s movie is an acerbic portrayal of postwar Japanese society at a moment when domesticity, increasingly defined by calculations in what will come to be called the managed society (kanri shakai),8 is at odds with the image of the loving nuclear family found in TV real estate advertisements and national education. As the Noh music alerted us, this domesticity is a stage, albeit for an impossible viewer, the Maeda now pretending to be poor to protect their son (rightfully accused of embezzlement by his boss), now posing as a successful bourgeois family that survived the woes of war and reconstruction (the father is a war veteran, and symptomatically this status is the only ground of legitimacy left more or less unquestioned by the movie). In this respect, the impossible point of view at the beginning of the movie precisely reflects the insurmountable gap between need and pleasure, a gap that becomes a generative tension once, as in Kon’s post-1923 urban studies, fakeness is not a moral issue and becomes the ground of urban everyday dwelling experiences: what I have called an ornamentalism. In an article published in the weekly magazine Bungei Shunjū in March 1956, two years before the Harumi Danchi opened, entitled “Do Apartments Change Women?” (Apātoha onnawo kaerunoka), Kon Wajirō reflected on the changes in social etiquette and collective life brought about by the modern apartment. When rented apartments first appeared before 1923, Kon recollects, people wondered about the housewife, locked up in her apartment after the hero (shujinkō) left for work: “Isn’t she going to let her lover in and do weird things? Isn’t the apartment going to corrupt public mores?”9 Ironically echoing anxieties of the time, Kon shows how the modern rented apartment is from the start associated with the modern woman, with crime and with wild fantasies of domesticity. The locked door radically separates inside from outside, public from private, and allows for all kinds of fantasies of transgression. Which is why, Kon adds, should a criminal be at the entrance, there is no escape for the poor housewife. This dual motif of closed spaces and human traffic is central to both Elegant Beast and Kon’s post-1923 urban studies. The space of the Harumi Danchi apartment is claustrophobic, a feeling marked by the use of frames within frames and the bars of the balcony. For Kawashima the world is a jail: there is no breaking through the wall or opening the door to leave the space of domesticity.10 Several times the camera is placed in such a way that the screen is partitioned to show two simultaneous scenes in different parts of the apartment, each party concerned seemingly oblivious to the other. More than early modern Edo, the world of modern urbanity is indeed a jail, albeit one whose increasing everyday fragmentation allows for creative play and an engagement with a planetary situation, in short, for new experiences of collective life. In fact, Kawashima’s Harumi

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Danchi figures this urban jail in broad strokes precisely to reopen a space of collective play, a play of surfaces that communicate together in an ongoing dance of objects, images, personas, and sounds. The scene halfway through the movie when the brother and sister start their incestuous frenzy dance to the sound of jazz is exemplary of this imagination of the urban everyday as a space of play and speculative thinking that I have attempted to recover from the hegemonic narrative of the urban question. As in modernology, the only freedom here, if it is a question of freedom, is one of movement across layers of everyday spaces. The movie takes place almost entirely inside the Maeda apartment, shot from a variety of possible and impossible angles, combining on-site and studio shooting to portray the danchi apartment as an open labyrinth of possibilities. The camera keeps changing position, playing with space, partitioning and departitioning, looking through a window in the wall or a trap in the door when not gazing through the floor or the ceiling. In Kawashima’s filmography, everyday spaces communicate with each other. There is no absolute distinction between private and public spaces, and any turn of the road or door in the corridor can open onto another stage, another encounter, another experience.11 This is not to deny the reality of spatial rationalization and functional compartmentalization. But structures do not determine use, or rather, fixed plans only set the stage for dwelling practices, experiences, and pleasures. The kind of conventional voyeuristic desire found, for example, in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) is only one possible effect of the locked apartment. Not only are the possibilities innumerable (as a finite set of permutations within a closed ensemble), the rented apartment’s singular capacity for expansion and improvement holds an infinite potential for experiences and ethico-aesthetic practices (as an open spectrum of social practices). Our dwelling places are the temporary shelters that allow us to encounter the urban planetary. They are dynamic forms precariously holding together in the midst of ongoing movement and change, a spectacle of speed, of change as ongoing deformation. This is the situation of planetary urbanity that has set the stage for our modern dwelling practices, practices that have too often been reduced to the fiction of bourgeois domesticity, a having rather than a being, because always already lost. As I have shown in this book, urban dwelling is first a speculative practice that does not allow for a having, only a borrowing, living on rent. This is why the literary world has become in Japan in particular the place for theory as speculative fiction, what is called cultural critique (hihyō). Cultural critique inaugurated by Kobayashi Hideo is always engaging with the question of dwelling, and in particular urban dwelling, looking for dwelling forms appropriate to an emerging planetary situation. It is easy of

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course to point at Kobayashi’s mistaken reading of Katai and others, as I have, but that is not the point; what matters is rather his suspicion of the ideology of the lost home, thus opening a field for questioning, displacing, and reopening the urban subject to what we can today name the urban planetary. This is not to say that political economy does not matter. It does—but it is not prior. This is why I proposed to read these now classical Japanese writers against the grain, as they faced an unprecedented situation that did not allow one actually to dwell in place. They had to learn to dwell in transit before having access to a proper place of domesticity. The four urban writers discussed in this book are all concerned with the possibility of securing a national space, but as I showed, they engaged principally with an everyday situation of planetary urbanity before facing the global condition of a world of nation-states. This is what the deconstruction of national literature could not address and why literary studies as urban studies for the most part end up reproducing the object they purport to criticize: the national that becomes the fetish of literary studies as much as the urban condition is the fetish of urban studies, both brought together by history as national history. A close reading of these writers shows, however, that we should not conflate the global with the national too quickly, because the national always leaks into the urban planetary, not because of having lost its home but because it can also be a space of gestation for dwelling in the urban planetary. The national spectacle of movement and change found in Ōgai, Katai, Kafū, and Wajirō is a temporary station on the way to the urban planetary.

Notes 1. Nishikawa Yūko, Shakuya to mochiie no bungakushi: Watashi no utsuwa no monogatari [A literary history of rented houses and landlords: A story of the containers of “I”] (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1998). 2. Toshiya Ueno made this point several times during our planetary love workshops, the latest held in Kyoto on December 20, 2022. 3. Jordan Sand, Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 53. 4. Fujimori Terunobu, “Rojō kansatsu no hata no motoni” [Under the banner of street observation], in Rojō kansatsu nyūmon [Introduction to street observation science], ed. Akasegawa Genpei, Fujimori Terunobu, and Minami Shinbo (1987; reis. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2006), 17. 5. Laura Neitzel, The Life We Longed For: Danchi Housing and the Middle-Class Dream in Postwar Japan (Portland, ME: MerwinAsia, 2016). 6. This discussion of Elegant Beast builds on a series of workshops on Kawashima Yūzo that I organized in Tokyo in June–July 2018 and in February 2020

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in Osaka, with Earl Jackson, Anne McKnight, Frederic Veith, Lindsay Welson, and Alex Zahlten, as well as a movie screening of Elegant Beast in Fukuoka at Tetra Art Space in August 2018. 7. Harumi Danchi was the first collective housing with elevators in almost all of its buildings. 8. Marilyn Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 239–248. 9. Kon Wajirō, “Apātoha onna wo kaeru ka” [Do apartments change women?] Kon Wajirō Shū [Collected works of Kon Wajirō], ed. Kawazoe Noboru (Tokyo: Domes, 1971–1972), 4, 196. Kon plays on the word shujin (literally master, referring to the husband) and shujinkō (the hero of a fictional narrative). 10. Third Kawashima Yūzo Workshop at Ritsumeikan in February 2020. 11. I thank Earl Jackson for this point developed at the third Kawashima Yūzo workshop in February 2020 at Ritsumeikan University.

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v

Index

Page references for figures are italicized. accuracy, 41, 54, 93, 126–29, 148, 204 affect, 6, 10–13, 27–30, 38–39, 43–44, 69, 81–83, 111, 132–36, 155–56, 173, 182, 197, 213–28 Agamben, Giorgio, 167 Ahmed, Sarah, 166 alienation, 5–10, 19–20, 26, 32, 37, 51, 54, 57, 69, 85, 94, 107, 121, 136, 142, 158, 165–67, 177–78, 182, 204, 206, 220 Alpers, Svetlana, 145n39 Amin, Ash, 99 Anderson, Benedict, 41–43 Anthropocene, 23, 34n65 Aoyama, Tomoko, 35, 52 arabesque, 14, 19, 165, 170, 237–38 assemblage, 27, 76, 84, 113, 116, 120, 125, 131, 177, 198, 216, 220; atmospheric assemblage, 153–54, 186 atmosphere, 1–2, 9–18, 80–83, 103n48, 120, 132, 140, 142, 153, 224; dwelling, 16, 18, 31n26, 154; urban, 3, 17, 28, 97, 110

attitude, 41, 81, 92, 109, 112, 116–20, 124, 171, 178, 208–9, 220–21; ethico-aesthetic, 130, 135, 167 autistic, 238 Bachelard, Gaston, 33n49, 196, 234n65 barracks, 16, 31, 177, 205–12, 225; barrack-ornament, 26, 28, 154, 171, 194–98, 205–6, 210, 216–17, 224, 227 Baudrillard, Jean, 32, 78 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 18, 114–15, 125, 130, 144n15, 157–58, 165 Bergson, Henri, 15, 37, 50, 61n6, 94, 227 Blanchot, Maurice, 13, 136, 228 Bloch, Ernst, 19, 136 Brenner, Neil, 3, 29n8 bridge, 40, 45–46, 84, 88–90, 112–13, 127, 134–42, 172, 202; Imado Bridge, 90, 139, 141–42, 238; Imperial Bridge, 202, 204 Bunriha, 33n50, 168, 188n24, 189n30

265

266  v  Index

bystander, 26, 37, 51, 53, 56–60, 91–92, 116, 138, 165–67, 221 cartographer, 38, 44, 50 cartographic, 93, 99, 116, 162; heterotopia, 27, 109; impulse, 38, 54, 122, 131–32, 175; practice, 9, 15, 26, 62n23, 79, 92, 113, 120, 127–31; writing, 5, 26, 35–60, 237 cartography, 5, 12, 14, 16, 40–41, 45– 46, 49–50, 54, 59–60, 92, 115, 118, 122, 128–29, 138, 153, 158, 164–65 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 20, 174, 200 childhood, 51, 53, 117, 123–24, 130, 138 China, 22, 80, 125 Chow, Rey, 6 circulation, 2, 4, 8, 16–18, 22, 26–27, 32n41, 38–60, 68, 75, 79, 81, 83, 88, 91, 110–11, 113, 119, 122–23, 133–34, 158, 164, 183, 199, 202, 205, 213, 216, 218, 224, 240 condition, 3–7, 11, 16–21, 46, 59, 60, 68, 81, 117, 119, 140, 155–58, 168, 169, 172, 176–78, 180–82, 187n6, 199, 208–9, 213–14, 225, 240, 243; global urban, 26, 37; of modernity, 114 confessional: literature, 35; mode, 51, 72–73, 85. See also I-novel constraint, 7, 59, 158, 192n77 coordinate, 55, 82; grid of, 41–46, 50, 204 country, 3, 40–41, 52, 55, 59–60, 62, 67, 71, 91, 118, 122, 140, 153, 172, 205; the city and, 16–17, 27, 38, 49, 68, 70, 89, 98, 180–82; love for the, 112, 137 danchi, 239–42 de Certeau, Michel, 13, 46, 74, 107n93, 164, 187n11, 221 Deleuze, Gilles, 13, 17, 30n26, 57, 65, 97, 131, 149, 154, 169, 218, 227

Deligny, Fernand, 238 desire, 2, 6–9, 20–24, 51, 60, 72, 79, 81–82, 99, 113–14, 117, 121, 137, 140, 144, 155, 164–67, 182, 185, 188, 191, 208–17, 240, 242; melancholic, 39; nostalgic, 32, 54, 69, 136 diagram, 38, 44, 46, 153–54, 162, 165– 69, 199; image and, 127–28, 158; map and, 164 dialect, 52 dialectic, 20–21, 25, 63, 85, 110, 175; of centrality, 70, 132 disorientation, 26, 37, 49, 51–53; experience of, 54–57; scene of, 52, 205 distance, 10, 31, 39, 51, 59, 75, 95, 107n94, 113, 116, 199, 202, 221 Dōjunkai, 172, 225 domesticity, 2, 21, 39, 51–56, 68, 241; bourgeois domesticity, 39, 72, 74, 238, 242; crisis of, 237 dwelling in passing, 1, 2, 10, 14–16, 24, 238 Edo, 17, 41, 45, 67, 76, 78, 80, 88, 99, 112–42; Edo-kiriezu, 110; Edo-kirizu, 27; Edo meisho, 45, 74, 76, 78, 87, 95; Edo-Tokyo studies, 3–4, 32 encounter, 8, 14, 17–18, 21, 28, 35, 38–44, 52–60, 68, 71, 79, 81, 88–92, 110, 115–16, 121–22, 155, 166–67, 175, 186, 194–96, 210, 228, 237–38, 242; everyday, 46, 49–50, 119; of land and road, 77, 90, 92, 97; romantic, 39, 116. See also planetary, urban envelope, 2, 9–13; of temporal existence, 1, 16, 153, 196 environment, 11–12, 48, 58, 92, 113, 153–58, 169, 175–86, 206, 208, 218; machinic, 220; urban, 18, 25, 111, 156 environmental power, 187n3 Escobar, Arturo, 199 Express Survey Maps, 38, 42, 47, 48

Index  v  267

Fair-Weather Clogs, 2, 27, 70, 109–42 Felski, Rita, 6 Foucault, Michel, 13, 120, 128, 154 Fujimori, Terunobu, 210, 238 Galt, Rosalind, 19 Gandy, Matthew, 12, 110, 186, 222 Geddes, Patrick, 18, 180, 181 Goi, Makoto, 77, 118 The Great Kanto Earthquake, 27, 31, 76, 156, 158, 171–72, 194, 212, 237 Guattari, Félix, 14, 31, 37, 131, 149, 154, 167, 177, 180, 191, 218, 227 Harootunian, Harry, 1, 10, 12, 14, 16, 19, 185 Harvey, David, 21, 64, 175 Haver, William, 85 Heidegger, Martin, 24, 30, 32, 69, 190, 200 heterotopia, 27, 116, 128, 154, 186 historicality, 19, 82 home, 1, 10–13, 33, 56, 68, 71, 76, 81, 98, 113, 121, 123, 141, 237, 240; lost, 5, 8, 14, 17, 22, 24, 26, 40, 58–59, 64n43, 69, 72, 111, 114, 164, 167, 199, 215, 217, 219, 235, 243 homosexuality, 39 I-novel, 26, 72–73, 78, 102 irritation, 26–27, 38–39, 52–59 Jameson, Fredric, 71, 140, 197–98, 220 Jinnai, Hidenobu, 3, 225 Kamei, Hideo, 57, 85–86, 89, 91 Karatani, Kōjin, 37, 85–86, 91, 107, 139 Katai, Tayama, 3, 15–16, 25–26, 45, 67–72, 85–85, 97, 137, 216 Katō, Norihiro, 86–87 Kawakami Tōgai, 63

Kawashima, Yūzō, 239–42 Kobayashi, Hideo, 72–73, 79, 97, 242–43 Kon, Wajirō, 2–34, 39, 52, 63, 68, 100, 111, 126, 153–86, 193–228, 237–41 Kracauer, Siegfried, 217 Kunikida, Doppo, 77, 85–86, 105n67 Kyoto, 86–87, 106, 111, 115, 119, 129, 138, 173 Lamarre, Thomas, 37, 61n8, 106n73 landscape, 27, 45–46, 68, 73, 78, 81– 99, 128–29, 183, 200, 202, 215, 218; beautiful, 111–16, 132; national, 41, 43, 53, 77, 130; urban, 12, 51, 116, 119–25, 131–42, 198 landscapism, 16, 27, 68–74, 83–86, 90–91, 100, 111 Latour, Bruno, 24–25, 61n8 Lefebvre, Henri, 3–4, 9, 14, 16, 18, 27, 30, 32n46, 54, 56, 81, 104n54, 133, 146n43, 175, 212, 219 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 216 lines, 55, 83, 111, 141, 162, 165–66, 168, 181, 193, 198, 205, 215, 224, 238; of flight, 31n36; wandering, 237 littoral city, 40, 110–12, 132, 138–43 Loos, Adolf, 174 Looser, Thomas, 125, 233n60 love, 11, 41, 60–61, 112, 137 Lukàcs, Georg, 19–20 Lyotard, Jean-François, 2 Maeda, Ai, 29, 53, 71, 81, 107n95, 110, 133, 139–42 Magne, Émile, 133–34 mapping impulse, 38, 54, 122, 132, 175, 191 map-thing, 14–15, 162 Massumi, Brian, 6, 187n3 McCormack, Derek P., 10–11 McKnight, Anne, 139, 151n94

268  v  Index

melancholic, 27, 39, 68–70, 80, 82, 84, 95, 97, 106n76, 138, 142 melancholy, 81 memory, 58, 77–78, 86–87, 94 milieu, 11, 98, 108n105, 113, 115–20, 131, 149, 155, 176–77, 182, 206, 212, 214, 219, 225–28, 235n86 minshū, 172–73, 176, 212 Miyoshi, Masao, 7 mobility, 58, 66, 74, 221–22 modernology, 3, 5, 27–28, 52, 123–78, 186, 198–99, 205–6, 211–14, 227, 238, 242 monstrous, 28, 154, 178, 218–20 Moretti, Franco, 57 Mori, Ōgai, 2–5, 10–16, 25–28, 35–61, 68, 91–93, 111, 125, 157, 162, 164, 166, 183, 202, 205, 243 mother, 51, 58, 106, 139–42 Musashino, 84–91 Musashino, 47, 67–94 Nagai, Kafū, 2–5, 12–17, 25–27, 40, 54, 64, 73, 109–42 Nakatani, Reiji, 166, 187 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 68, 74, 93, 97–100, 108n100, 171 Narita, Ryūichi, 4, 79 navigation, 37–38, 40, 57, 60, 110, 126–28, 186 near-suburb, 26–28, 67–99, 110–11, 150, 182, 198–99, 215 The Near-Suburb of Tokyo: One-or Two Day Trips, 2, 26–27, 68, 75–83, 94–99 neoliberal, 31, 50, 144, 176 The New Guidebook to Greater Tokyo, 28, 154, 167, 193–97, 204–5, 212–28 Ngai, Sian, 10–11, 39, 69, 111, 155–56, 178, 197 Nikkō, 174, 182–83, 219 origin, 2, 8, 21, 41, 46, 52, 57–60, 67, 76, 85, 132–36, 145, 171–75, 196, 200, 205

ornament, 16, 63, 167, 170, 211–12, 216, 224–27. See also barracks, barrack-ornament ornamentalism, 1, 18, 20, 31, 173–74, 200, 220, 241 panoramic, 138, 151n93; panoramic perception, 204; panoramic view, 94, 117–18, 145, 201–2, 212 paranoid heterotoropia, 113, 116, 128– 32, 154, 158, 161, 162, 163, 165, 172, 184–87 park, 15, 28, 137, 149, 153–54 Park, Ezra, 221–22 perspective, 46, 48, 56, 73, 97, 111, 116, 122, 137–42, 232n41; linear, 43 perspectivalism, 37, 70, 79, 111–12, 122, 137, 142, 149n74, 150n90 photography, 92–93, 158 place, bashosei. See station planetary: situation, 1–7, 20–26, 39, 68–70, 153–55, 158, 175–77, 181, 197, 199, 217, 232n41, 222, 238; urban, 7– 19, 109, 113; urbanization, 27, 68, 83, 97–99, 110–15, 138, 198–99, 217, 220 Povinelli, Elizabeth A., 69 Pratt, Mary Louise, 74, 90 queer, 2, 12, 19, 27, 38–39, 98–99, 110, 132, 166, 186, 216, 222, 228, 238; theory, 2, 19 Rancière, Jacques, 20, 57–58 rationality, 41n41, 117, 166, 170, 180, 199, 204–5, 216–17, 221, 228 representation, 14–15, 33, 41, 50–55, 73, 79, 87, 92, 129, 142, 167–69 The River Sumida, 27, 109, 111, 116, 132–42 Ross, Kristin, 83 rural, 3, 12, 17–18, 25, 51, 67, 89, 99, 100, 139, 156, 168, 189, 197, 206, 209, 218 Samuelson, Meg, 111

Index  v  269

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 94, 230n95 Sedgwick, Eve, 29, 112 Seidensticker, Edward, 70, 110, 114– 15, 139 Shaviro, Steven, 9, 33n56 shelter, 2, 9–16, 59, 99, 111, 196, 199, 206, 211, 213; temporary, 39–40, 83, 99, 110, 220, 242 Shitamachi, 70, 76, 110, 113, 117–18, 122, 134 shizu, 44–50 Simmel, Georg, 90, 93, 107n94, 136, 142, 178, 221, 228 singularity, 87, 157, 187, 208, 238 situational reading, 5–7 Sloterdijk, Peter, 8, 11–12 speed, 44, 55, 59, 97, 107, 124, 144, 171–72, 199, 220; spectacle of, 10, 20, 28, 206, 211–16, 222, 228, 235, 242 standard Japanese, 52, 118 station, 67, 74, 80–81, 98–100, 199, 204; old, 53, 75, 81–84, 97, 137, 198; Tokyo, 212–13, 218, 224–25; train, 15, 53, 58, 60, 68–70, 77, 184, 202, 222 Stengers, Isabelle, 7, 158, 187n6 stuplimity, 28, 155–56, 178, 197–98, 228 subjectivity, 4, 10–11, 17, 19, 32, 35, 60, 63, 68, 85–86, 139, 177–80, 197–98, 213, 227; national, 37; pathic, 52, 184; urban, 15, 38, 50, 57, 73, 158, 165, 170, 175, 214, 237 surface, 6, 19–20, 23, 28, 38–42, 92–98, 111, 117, 126, 131, 137, 141, 174, 177–81, 197–98, 208, 212–21, 238, 242 Suzuki, Tomi, 73

synchronicity, 77, 129 technology, 24, 44, 92, 120, 180 territory, 12, 25, 34, 70, 79, 87, 132, 149, 164, 208, 209, 218, 226–28, 237; dwelling, 116, 122, 177–79, 211; national, 15, 22, 40–60, 80, 129, 156–57, 181–99 Tosaka, Jun, 18, 166–67, 199, 221 transport, 49, 73, 98, 110, 117, 133, 181, 193, 201–4; system, 45, 53, 55, 65, 70, 77–82, 126, 136, 179, 215, 225 travelogue, 26, 67–79, 84, 90–94, 99, 109, 121, 148n67 Ukai, Satoshi, 7, 23 unevenness, 23, 28, 69, 75–83, 93, 100, 111–12, 130, 136, 198 urban: ecologies, 18, 26–27, 111, 153–54, 194, 199, 206. See also planetary, urban; planetary, urbanization; subjectivity, urban used objects, 20, 26, 37–41, 57–60 water, 12, 16–17, 26–27, 40, 84, 90, 97, 110–16, 122–24, 131–42 Watsuji, Tetsurō, 190–91 weather, 27, 110–11, 117, 120 witness, 82, 165–67, 198, 238 woman, 39–40, 54, 88–91, 141, 165, 215–16, 241 Yamanote, 71–71, 76, 118, 134, 181– 82, 215 Yoda, Tomiko, 65 Yonemoto, Marcia, 126 Youth, 2, 25–26, 30, 37, 40, 49–60, 129, 166 youth, 57, 76, 84, 140, 189n39, 196

v

About the Author

Christophe Thouny is associate professor of visual culture and media studies, modern literature, and critical theory at Ritsumeikan University. He is coeditor of Planetary Atmospheres and Urban Society after Fukushima and has published widely on Japanese popular culture and modern literature. He is now working on a monograph on postwar Japanese visual culture and social critique.

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