Shiro Yoshioka (SML): Popular representations of Tokyo
“Where are we going? Who are we?”: anxiety of discontinuity and yearning for continuity of history
Location: Research Beehive 2.20, Old Library Building
Time/Date: 9th February 2012, 16:00 - 17:00
Now online: ReCap version
“Where are we going? Who are we?”: anxiety of discontinuity and yearning for continuity of history in popular representations of Tokyo
“This is really a strange city. … As each building fell, a new one rose up. Look away for a second and everything is changed. Before you know it, the past is gone, No one in Tokyo seems to care about our vanishing history”.
In anime feature Patlabor: the Movie (1989), one of the characters lamented about the extraordinary speed of change in the landscape of Tokyo in the middle of so-called “Bubble economy”. Such magnitude and speed of change, however, was not limited to that particular period. Instead, it has been part and parcel of modern history of the Japanese capital. Highs and lows in the history of the city---earthquake, war, Olympic game, and economic craze---put the city in a ceaseless cycle of destruction and reconstruction. People, as seen in the quote above, do not pay much attention to the change. However, some of Japanese popular texts show anxiety such change can arouse through depiction of “Twilight Zone” in Tokyo where past is somehow trapped in the middle of the present without being replaced by things new. In this seminar, I will show some examples of such depiction, contextualising these fantastic images into “real” history of Tokyo.
Published: 13th January 2012