Download or read book A Short History of Tokyo written by Jonathan Clements and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tokyo, which in Japanese means the “Eastern Capital,” has only enjoyed that name and status for 150 years. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the city that is now Tokyo was a sprawling fishing town by the bay named Edo. Earlier still, in the Middle Ages, it was Edojuku, an outpost overlooking farmlands. And thousands of years ago, its mudflats and marshes were home to elephants, deer, and marine life. In this compact history, Jonathan Clements traces Tokyo’s fascinating story from the first forest clearances and the samurai wars to the hedonistic “floating world” of the last years of the Shogunate. He illuminates the Tokyo of the twentieth century with its destruction and redevelopment, boom and bust without forgoing the thousand years of history that have led to the Eastern Capital as we know it. Tokyo is so entwined with the history of Japan that it can be hard to separate them, and A Short History of Tokyo tells both the story of the city itself and offers insight into Tokyo’s position at the nexus of power and people that has made the city crucial to the events of the whole country.
Download or read book The Book of Tokyo written by Hideo Furukawa and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’
Download or read book History of Tokyo 1867 1989 written by Edward Seidensticker and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a freaking great book and I highly recommend it…if you are passionate about the history of 'the world's greatest city,' this book is something you must have in your collection." --JapanThis.com Edward Seidensticker's A History of Tokyo 1867-1989 tells the fascinating story of Tokyo's transformation from the Shogun's capital in an isolated Japan to the largest and the most modern city in the world. With the same scholarship and sparkling style that won him admiration as the foremost translator of great works of Japanese literature, Seidensticker offers the reader his brilliant vision of an entire society suddenly wrenched from an ancient feudal past into the modern world in a few short decades, and the enormous stresses and strains that this brought with it. Originally published as two volumes, Seidensticker's masterful work is now available in a handy, single paperback volume. Whether you're a history buff or Tokyo-bound traveler looking to learn more, this insightful book offers a fascinating look at how the Tokyo that we know came to be. This edition contains an introduction by Donald Richie, the acknowledged expert on Japanese culture who was a close personal friend of the author, and a preface by geographer Paul Waley that puts the book into perspective for modern readers.
Download or read book Edo the City that Became Tokyo written by Akira Naito and published by Kodansha Amer Incorporated. This book was released on 2003 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated account of the growth and development of Japan's capital cityrom the 16th to the end of the 19th centuries, this text gives a full anducid account of the development of Japan's premier urban landscape. Itsighly visual approach encompasses historical maps which detail theevelopment of the city.;In addition to information on architecturalevelopment, the book also provides details concerning technologies,ifestyles and social structures.
Download or read book Tokyo in Transit written by Alisa Freedman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work discusses literary depictions of mass transit in 20th century Tokyo in the decades preceding WWII. It cuts across literary and historical/sociological analysis, and contributes to the growing body of work examining Japanese urbanism, gender, and modernism.
Download or read book Tokyo Ueno Station National Book Award Winner written by Yu Miri and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.
Download or read book Tokyo Megacity written by Donald Richie and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This photographic Tokyo travel guide explores the dynamic Japanese culture, art and architecture that make Tokyo a world-class city. It has been said that "every city has its high points, but Tokyo is all exclamation points!" The largest and most populous city in the world, Tokyo must be experienced in person to be understood truly. The next best thing? Tokyo Megacity--a visual and descriptive exploration of a city that combines old with new and traditional with trendy, like no other city in the world. This extraordinary book explores Tokyo through 250 revealing photographs by well-known photographer Ben Simmons and over 30 essays by famed author Donald Richie. Their love of the city, their sense of its history, and the deep respect and pure joy felt in being here, shine through on every page. Simmons and Richie show us how modern Tokyo evolved from a patchwork of villages that still exist today as distinct neighborhoods and districts to the modern, trendsetting metropolis renowned the world over--that combine to make Tokyo a unique and special place. Tokyo Megacity presents the districts of the city in the order that they originally developed, starting with the Imperial Palace, sliding down to the "Low City" along the Sumida River, soaring back up to the "Mid-City," and finally, climbing the hills to the newer districts of the "High City." The combination of Ben Simmons' photographs and Donald Richie's text capture, as never before, the tremendous diversity, vitality and sheer livability of the megacity that is Tokyo.
Download or read book Tokyo written by and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 1999-09 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the myriad ways that urban dwellers respond to the space crunch. Four hundred color photos take you inside the habitations of artists, students, young professionals, and families. -- Back cover.
Download or read book Tokyo Fragments written by and published by Stone Bridge Press. This book was released on 2004-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Tokyo Fragments, five of Japan's most popular contemporary writers of fiction present their vision of life in different quarters of Japan's capital. Spend a day with Ryota and Hiroshi on the mean streets of Shinjuku, spying on visitors to the local love hotel and sniffing glue in station toilets. Eavesdrop on the regulars at a bar in the old town as they fantasize about a fellow-customer who claims to work in the insurance business - but may be more experienced at taking life than insuring it. Join Eriko as she hunts for Mr. Right in trendy western Tokyo. Can you judge men by the same standards you apply to consumer goods? Maybe you can, but you'd better watch out for counterfeits!
Download or read book Tokyo A Biography written by Stephen Mansfield and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Tokyo is as eventful as it is long. A concise yet detailed overview of this fascinating, centuries-old city, Tokyo: A Biography is a perfect companion volume for history buffs or Tokyo-bound travelers looking to learn more about their destination. In a whirlwind journey through Tokyo's past from its earliest beginnings up to the present day, this Japanese history book demonstrates how the city's response to everything from natural disasters to regime change has been to reinvent itself time and again. A calamitous fire results in a massive expansion of the city's territory. A debate over the Samurai code creates far-reaching social change. A malleable boy becomes the figurehead for powerful forces which change an ancient feudal society into a modern industrialized power within a generation. Utter destruction wipes the slate clean again so Tokyoites may start all over. And so it goes. Tokyo's story is riveting, and by the end of Tokyo: A Biography, readers see a city almost unrivaled in its uniqueness, a place that--despite its often tragic history--still shimmers as it prepares to face the future.
Download or read book Shinto written by Nobutaka Inoue and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shinto - A Short History provides an introductory outline of the historical development of Shinto from the ancient period of Japanese history until the present day. Shinto does not offer a readily identifiable set of teachings, rituals or beliefs; individual shrines and kami deities have led their own lives, not within the confines of a narrowly defined Shinto, but rather as participants in a religious field that included Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian and folk elements. Thus, this book approaches Shinto as a series of historical 'religious systems' rather than attempting to identify a timeless 'Shinto essence'. This history focuses on three aspects of Shinto practice: the people involved in shrine worship, the institutional networks that ensured continuity, and teachings and rituals. By following the interplay between these aspects in different periods, a pattern of continuity and discontinuity is revealed that challenges received understandings of the history of Shinto. This book does not presuppose prior knowledge of Japanese religion, and is easily accessible for those new to the subject.
Download or read book Tokyo Before Tokyo written by Timon Screech and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2024-11-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich and original history of Edo, the shogun’s city that became modern Tokyo. Tokyo today is one of the world’s mega-cities and the center of a scintillating, hyper-modern culture—but not everyone is aware of its past. Founded in 1590 as the seat of the warlord Tokugawa family, Tokyo, then called Edo, was the locus of Japanese trade, economics, and urban civilization until 1868, when it mutated into Tokyo and became Japan’s modern capital. This beautifully illustrated book presents important sites and features from the rich history of Edo, taken from contemporary sources such as diaries, guidebooks, and woodblock prints. These include the huge bridge on which the city was centered; the vast castle of the Shogun; sumptuous Buddhist temples, bars, kabuki theaters, and Yoshiwara—the famous red-light district.
Download or read book An Armchair Traveller s History of Tokyo written by Jonathan Clements and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With almost 13 million residents, Tokyo is now as much an icon of modernity as it is a city, with its neon-lit billboards, futuristic technology, and avant-garde fashion scene. But the long and fascinating history of Japan’s modern capital encompasses much, much more, and in An Armchair Traveller’s History of Tokyo, Jonathan Clements sketches the city’s amazing trajectory from its humble beginnings as a group of clearings in a forest on the Kanto plain all the way to its upcoming role as host of the 2020 Olympic Games. Tokyo, meaning “Eastern Capital,” has only enjoyed that name and status for 150 years. Before that, it was a medieval outpost designed to keep watch over rich farmlands. But this seemingly unassuming geographical location ultimately led to its status as a supercity. Though the imperial court ruled Japan from the sleepy city of Kyoto, the landowners of the Kanto plain where Tokyo lies held the true wealth and power in Japan, which they eventually asserted in a series of bloody civil wars. The Tokyo region became the administrative center of Japan’s Shogun overlords and the site of a vibrant urban culture home to theaters, taverns, and brothels. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, it became Japan’s true capital, home to the emperors, the seat of government, and a site of rapid urban growth. Anyone who’s ever longed to look upon Mount Fuji, embody the bravery of the Samurai, or savor the world’s finest sushi will find themselves transported from the comfort of their armchair while reading Clements’s account of Tokyo.
Download or read book A Tokyo Romance written by Ian Buruma and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic memoir of self-invention in a strange land: Ian Buruma's unflinching account of his amazing journey into the heart of Tokyo's underground culture as a young man in the 1970's When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the world of his upper middleclass youth, what he longed for wasn’t so much the exotic as the raw, unfiltered humanity he had experienced in Japanese theater performances and films, witnessed in Amsterdam and Paris. One particular theater troupe, directed by a poet of runaways, outsiders, and eccentrics, was especially alluring, more than a little frightening, and completely unforgettable. If Tokyo was anything like his plays, Buruma knew that he had to join the circus as soon as possible. Tokyo was an astonishment. Buruma found a feverish and surreal metropolis where nothing was understated—neon lights, crimson lanterns, Japanese pop, advertising jingles, and cabarets. He encountered a city in the midst of an economic boom where everything seemed new, aside from the isolated temple or shrine that had survived the firestorms and earthquakes that had levelled the city during the past century. History remained in fragments: the shapes of wounded World War II veterans in white kimonos, murky old bars that Mishima had cruised in, and the narrow alleys where street girls had once flitted. Buruma’s Tokyo, though, was a city engaged in a radical transformation. And through his adventures in the world of avant garde theater, his encounters with carnival acts, fashion photographers, and moments on-set with Akira Kurosawa, Buruma underwent a radical transformation of his own. For an outsider, unattached to the cultural burdens placed on the Japanese, this was a place to be truly free. A Tokyo Romance is a portrait of a young artist and the fantastical city that shaped him. With his signature acuity, Ian Buruma brilliantly captures the historical tensions between east and west, the cultural excitement of 1970s Tokyo, and the dilemma of the gaijin in Japanese society, free, yet always on the outside. The result is a timeless story about the desire to transgress boundaries: cultural, artistic, and sexual.
Download or read book Tokyo on Foot written by Florent Chavouet and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This prize-winning book is both an illustrated tour of a Tokyo rarely seen in Japan travel guides and an artist's warm, funny, visually rich, and always entertaining graphic memoir. Florent Chavouet, a young graphic artist, spent six months exploring Tokyo while his girlfriend interned at a company there. Each day he would set forth with a pouch full of color pencils and a sketchpad, and visit different neighborhoods. This stunning book records the city that he got to know during his adventures. It isn't the Tokyo of packaged tours and glossy guidebooks, but a grittier, vibrant place, full of ordinary people going about their daily lives and the scenes and activities that unfold on the streets of a bustling metropolis. Here you find businessmen and women, hipsters, students, grandmothers, shopkeepers, policemen, and other urban types and tribes in all manner of dress and hairstyles. A temple nestles among skyscrapers; the corner grocery anchors a diverse assortment of dwellings, cafes, and shops--often tangled in electric lines. The artist mixes styles and tags his pictures with wry comments and observations. Realistically rendered advertisements or posters of pop stars contrast with cartoon sketches of iconic objects or droll vignettes, like a housewife walking her pet pig, a Godzilla statue in a local park, and an urban fishing pond that charges 400 yen per half hour. This very personal guide to Tokyo is organized by neighborhood with hand-drawn maps that provide an overview of each neighborhood, but what really defines them is what caught the artist's eye and attracted his formidable drawing talent. Florent Chavouet begins his introduction by observing that, "Tokyo is said to be the most beautiful of ugly cities." With wit, a playful sense of humor, and the multicolor pencils of his kit, he sets aside the question of urban ugliness or beauty and captures the Japanese essence of a great city in this truly vital portrait.
Download or read book Kengo Kuma My Life as an Architect in Tokyo My Life as an Architect written by Kengo Kuma and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A personal tour of Tokyo’s architecture, as seen through the eyes of one of the world’s most acclaimed architects who is also designing the primary venue for the Tokyo Olympic games. Tokyo is Japan’s cultural and commercial epicenter, bursting with vibrancy and life. Its buildings, both historical and contemporary, are a direct reflection of its history and its people. Kengo Kuma was only ten years old when he found himself so inspired by Tokyo’s cityscape that he decided to become an architect. Here he tells the story of his career through twenty-five inspirational buildings in the city. Kuma’s passion is evident on every page, as well as his curiosity about construction methods and his wealth of knowledge about buildings around the world, making this a unique commentary on Tokyo’s dynamic architecture. Kengo Kuma: My Life as an Architect is an intimate and truly inspiring book, revealing the beauty that exists in the world’s everyday spaces.
Download or read book Secret Tokyo written by Pierre Mustière and published by Editions Jonglez. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A building that acts as a giant firewall, a secret city center canyon, a statue that cures warts, ultra-modern designer toilets, an extraordinary tree that helps you quit smoking, an electronic sunflower, a spectacular modern temple hidden in the heart of Shinjuku, a street that gives Tokyo taxi drivers nightmares, a massive building that looks like a warship, forgotten rivers ... Far from the crowds and the usual clichés, Tokyo swings between modernity and tradition, preservation of its heritage, sophisticated aestheticism and eccentricity, offering countless off-beat experiences. The Japanese capital is home to any number of well-hidden treasures that are revealed only to residents and travellers who find their way off the beaten track. An indispensable guide for those who thought they knew Tokyo well or would like to discover the other face of the city.
