Sky and Water: the Deep Structures of Tokyo

Sky and Water: The Deep Structures of Tokyo Henry D. Smith II And6 Hiroshige Literal-minded visitors to contemporary Tokyo may find little of relevance Tanabata festival at Shichci Han-ei, from the series One Hundred famous Views or appeal in the city’s “sky and water.” The sky is alternately invisible as of Edo. 1857 they wander dazed through boundless subterranean spaces, opaque as color woodblock print they traverse central intersections where digital monitors display decibels 19 x 15, 48.3 x 38.1 Collection Elvehjem Museum of Art, of noise and parts per million of pollutants, or carved into a crazy-quilt E.B. Van Vleck Collection, skyline of wires, signs and unmatched buildings. “Water” seems even less Bequest of John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, University of Wisconsin, Madison accessible, with grand old moats shadowed by looming freeways, once- pure streams reduced to concrete channels of refuse, and the great Sumida River almost completely shut off from casual view. But if they-really “we,” the outside observers-look again, beyond these surface observations and quick judgments, look back through the history of the city to its Edo origins almost four centuries ago, we come to learn that “sky” and “water” in fact control the form and spirit of Tokyo. We discover no matter how the content of sky and water change, their underlying deep structures persist. “Sky,” we discover, is the structure of horizontality, of an unbounded and uncentered expanse against which the graphic vertical “face” of the city is written. “Water” is the structure of periodicgathering, of momentary release from everyday strictures of discipline and authority, of that familiar yet hard-to-place milieu called the “floating world.” Edo Sky Like most historic settlements in Japan, Edo was oriented toward hills and mountains-but in a unique way. It lay not in a cozy basin, like the ancient WIICt: lhls rnalerlal may be plotectda b capitals of Nara and Kyoto where forested mountains were close and totwcight law iTitlr 17, U 5 tnd..’ familiar, but was founded, rather, at an intersection of three low-lying landscapes, with true mountains hovering far in the distance as low anchors of a sort wholly unprecedented in the mainstream of Japanese culture before the seventeenth century. Edo’s two landscapes to the east, Edo Bay and the Sumida-Arakawa- Edo River delta, were landscapes of water, low and flat. But from a different perspective, the true flatness of Edo lay rather in the hilly terrain to the west, toward the area that in modern times has come to be known as the Yamanote (literally, “toward the mountains,” or Edward Seidensticker’s “High City”), an irregular pattern of interlaced valleys and 1. Edward Seidensticker, low City, High City: hills, with the highest elevations lying in a range of sixty to eighty feet Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake (New York: above Edo Bay.’ These tiny “mountains” are in fact merely the eastern Alfred A. Knopf. 1983). edge of the more extended flatness of the Musashino (Musashi Plain), which is epitomized in an ancient poem as follows: The plain of Musashi: No mountains For the moon to enter; It rises from the grasses, Sinks back into the grass’ This landscape, so uncanny to the ancient Japanese mentality, finds visual expression in a genre of screen painting depicting it, showing the tangled grasses of poetic fame with a moon rising eerily from among them. Above the grasses, as though in a wholly different space, is the far distant moun- tainscape anchored by the sacred peak of Mount Fuji. Architectural historian Shinjird Kirishiki has suggested that the actual street plan of downtown Edo, as laid out in the first decades after the founding of the city in 1590, was consciously oriented toward the hills of the Yamanote at close range, and the mountains of Fuji and Tsukuba at (detail) a far more distant range.’ It is only the latter, however, which seem to Map of Edo. 1632 have survived in the pictorial imagery of the city. Fuji is the greater in color woodblock map Courtesy Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library both absolute and symbolic size, and its unmistakable form came to constitute the most distinct element in the Edo sky, constantly reasserting the (opposite) Andd Hiroshige horizontality of the Edo world. Although the highest mountain in Japan /timan-fsubo Plain at Susaki, Fukagawa. (12,388 feet), Mount Fuji lay at a considerable distance from the city, from the series One Hundred famous Views of Edo, 1857 almost exactly one hundred kilometers from Nihonbashi, and as such was color woodblock print only a diminutive presence within the visual field; yet its symbolism was 13% x 8’%., 33.8 x 22.2 so powerful, reinforced during the Edo period (1603-1868) by a religious Collection The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Gift of anonymous St. Paul Friends cult dedicated to its worship, that Mount Fuji came to constitute the central focus of the Edo landscape.4 Mount Tsukuba was less distinctive than Fuji when seen from Edo. Closer than Fuji but less than one-quarter its height, Tsukuba was less often visible and less distinctive in form. It was a critical presence nonethe- less, anchoring the skyline to the northwest just as Mount Fuji anchored it to the southeast. Whereas Fuji was seen over the hills of the Yamanote and the intermediate Tanzawa range of mountains, Tsukuba was seen beyond the low-lying flats of the broad delta area. Both silhouettes are frequently captured in such classic representations of the late Edo landscape as Ando Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei, 1856-l 858). This essentially centrifugal orientation of the Edo landscape toward 2. Akira Naito, Edo no machi-kyodai toshi no tanjd (The Cify of Edo: The Birth of a distant mountain anchors was abetted by a weakness of visual focus within Metropolis) (Tokyo: Soshisha. 19821, vol. 1 the basic plan of the city itself. Such focus had not always been absent. of 2. p. 6. On the contrary, the great five-story donjon of Edo Castle, probably the 3. Shinjiro Kirishiki, “Tensho-Keich&Kan’ei ki Edo shigaichi kensetsu ni okeru keikan tallest permanent wooden structure ever erected in Japan, dominated the sekkei.” -(“Planning for Views in the Layout urban landscape with its sumptuous gilt finials for a half century after it of Edo Streets in the Tensho/Keichd/Kan’ei Eras”), T&y6 toritsu daigaku toshi kenkyii was first erected in 1607. It was the greatest central monument the city hdkoku, no. 24, August 1971, pp. l-22. would ever know: rising 275 feet above Edo Bay, it dominated the sur- 4. For the worship of Mount Fuji. see Koichiro Iwashina, Fujikd no rekishi (The History of the rounding hills and the neighboring flatlands alike. Fujik6) (Meicho shuppan. 1983). On the The destruction of this great landmark in the devastating Meireki Fire general problem of Edo’s relationship to the mountain, see my “Fuji Inside Edo: Putting of 1657 marked the end of an era, and the start of the progressive decen- the Mountain in Place” (unpublished paper, tralizing and blurring of the castle as a primary focus of Edo. The honors presented at Association of Asian Studies for height now passed to the Fujimi Watch of the Main Enceinte and the Annual Meeting, Philadelphia. 21 March 1985). Fushimi Watch of the West Enceinte, the two greatest of nineteen such towers, both still standing today as familiar symbols of the city. But the concentrated impact of the castle was now diffused among a diversity of watches and gates. Some other massive structures, notably Buddhist temples, continued to stand out against the Edo skyline, but the traditional forms of Japanese architecture assured that the formal thrust was outward rather than up- ward. The dominant roofs led the eye down and out, while the lack of eye-stopping facades encouraged a sense of progression through linear complexes of buildings, deflecting attention irom the structures themselves to the surrounding landscape and enveloping sky. Fushimi Watch of the West Enceinte of Edo Castle. These deflecting vectors of built form were reinforced by the constant expansion of vegetation throughout the Tokugawa era, the result of the (gatefold) systematic cultivation of trees and shrubs in the gardened environs of Artist unknown Mount Fuji and Miho Matsubara. shrine-temple compounds and elite samurai estates. This is graphically seventeenth century conveyed in later depictions of Edo Castle itself, showing masses of trees pair of six-fold screens; color on gold leaf 66 x 144, 167.6 x 365.7 competing with and even submerging the projecting watchtowers. Collection Mr. and Mrs. Peter Brest Whereas the Edo landscape was largely deforested in the early years of the city’s history, giving a disproportionate emphasis to buildings, by the early nineteenth century it was a city of densely green and cultivated aspects.5 The distant mountain anchors of Fuji and Tsukuba, however important symbolically, were only one element in the drawing out and de-centering of Edo. Equally important was a temporal factor, whereby patterns against the sky were not only appreciated but expressly cultivated for a sense of time. This was true of the viewing of Mount Fuji, which even under the clear skies of Edo could only be seen on about one day out of three, so close has it to the horizon and so common was the natural occlusion by fog, haze, heat and rain. The appreciation of Fuji was an appreciation of a momentary perception, rendered all the more poignant by the sublimity of the mountain’s form.

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