hmmn: musings from the far east(erwood)
Some images from today’s family outing to Chichibu, in the far western part of our prefecture (Saitama). It was about a 3-hour drive. Japanese take the changing of autumn leaves (called kouyou) very seriously. Today helped me understand why. Chichibu itself was a wonder to behold, hard to believe such beauty is so close at hand. Naoko’s family took many trips there during her childhood. I think this is something Naoko and I will continue, with our family.
I spent the better part of last Saturday wandering in and around my favorite Tokyo neighborhood, Kanda-Jimbocho. K-J, if you don’t know, is, for lack of a better description, Tokyo’s “booktown” (in the same way that Akihabara is Tokyo’s “Electric Town”). Within a several block radius, there must be upwards of 30 – 40 bookstores, most of them second-hand. I went armed with the indispensible Bookstores in Jimbocho (and Hongo) list from Evelyn Leeper (her list for the rest of Tokyo is here). I also went armed with a growing Amazon wish list, hoping I might get lucky and therefore avoid some prohibitive international shipping rates. And besides, virtual aisles may be dust and otaku-free but they’re decidedly not conducive to wandering.
And wander I did, from approximately 11am till 6pm. Some highlights:
Kitazawa Bookstore: This is where I started my day, it being the closest store to the Jimbocho subway exit I happened to pop my head out of. I knew they had English language books, but I was unprepared for an exclusively English language bookstore. Housed in a nice, airy building, with well-spaced out aisles, and subdued lighting, this store was comfortable, and eminently browsable, and had by far the best all-around selection of English-language books. I actually ended my Jimbocho tour back here, for they were the only store that stocked what ended up being my sole purchase on this day, Making Sense of Japanese Grammar, a small book published recently by the University of Hawaii Press, written by two linguists but in such a way that a layperson such as myself can understand the concepts.
Tokyodo. This store is dominated physically and perhaps figuratively by the looming presence of its 8-floor gorilla neighbor Sanseido, the largest bookstore in Jimbocho and the flagship for the company’s 21-store strong nationwide chain. And truthfully, with respect to English titles, on the whole Tokyodo can’t compete even with Sanseido’s fairly tepid English-language section on the 5th floor. However, forcing myself to walk amongst impenetrable stacks of Japanese language books in the hopes that I might come upon some English-language titles, what should I find almost tucked away out of sight but a huge selection of critical and theoretical English-language works, books like October: The Second Decade, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (Andrew Ross), Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Frederic Jameson), well, you get the idea. In short, not exactly bedtime reading and not exactly the stuff I’m hankering for at the moment, but boy am I glad to know that this section exists. You know, it’s funny, but I was led to the section because while in another part of the store I could hear the Japanese women exclaiming something along the lines of “I found it, I found it” to her girlfriend. I have no idea what theoretical tome she found, but I got the distinct impression she had been all over Tokyo looking for this book. No wonder, as Tokyodo’s theory and criticism section would rival or surpass just about any American bookstore (if they even had such a section) short of a Powell’s or City Lights.
Hara Shobo. One of the reasons Kanda-Jimbocho is my favorite Tokyo district, and why I spent so much time there during my first trip to Japan in 1997, is that along with its bevy of bookstores, there are several ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) galleries and ukiyo-e related bookstores. In 1997 on a tourist budget, I returned to the states loaded down with around 20 ukiyo-e books bought in K-J (only to ironically ship these books back to Japan with the rest of my stuff earlier this year), as well as a sizable collection of cheap but suitable for framing print reproductions. Now on a resident’s budget, I could only window shop, but I was very tempted at Hara Shobo by some wonderful Hokusai diptyches for 3000 yen (they were quite beat up but at that price they must have been older reproductions rather than originals). The gallery/bookstore on the second floor of the building is quite small and narrow, but very intimate, and it was a pleasure just to flip through the various stacks of prints.
Umi kaiten-sushi. Well, there were no books here, not that I could see anyway. This is a “conveyor belt” sushi establishment, and if you know me you know that I view kaiten-sushi establishments as the ultimate all-in-one source of edification for my mind, body and soul. This particular kaiten-sushi joint, while not of the low-rent every-plate-100-yen type sushi eatery that I usually frequent, does have a decent enough section of sushi making the rounds on blue and white 120 yen each plates, enough for me to squeeze out 8 plates and only force myself to repeat my selection once, and this willingly, on two plates of perfectly chilled maguro (tuna) laid over an ample supply of the “green stuff” (wasabi) that made my sinuses open up like the Red Sea and my eyes mist over. But truth be told, I stopped in here because it maintains a special place in my Tokyo history, it being the first kaiten-sushi place that Naoko took me to during my first trip here in 1997 (though not my first ever Tokyo kaiten-sushi place; that honor goes to a relatively forgettable establishment in Roppongi). In fact, during that 1997 trip I believe I ate at Umi on something like 4 different occassions (keep in mind that my trip as a whole was only 9 days long!).
Charles E. Tuttle. Unfortunately, the store owned by the venerable publisher of many Japan-related titles was not a highlight of my K-J trip, but rather a disappointment. Much like it’s rather weak attempt to change its name to “Tokyo Random Walk” (through some marker-scribbled construction paper signs taped to one of its windows and practically unnoticeable from the outside), I just didn’t get the feeling the store was trying very hard. Actually, the place felt very similar to a musuem store, with an ample selection of large (and expensive) art, photography, design, and architecture titles, but comparatively few Japan-related titles in fiction or history categories, and whereas Kitazawa was full of Tuttle-published titles, they were surprisingly in short supply at the Tuttle store.
Pictures taken in Jimbocho on this day can be seen here (click on the July 27, 2002 link).
Feeling the need to jumpstart my flagging photo diary, which like many of my extracurricular pursuits these days have taken a hit from the duty call of gainful employment, I spent two quite wonderful and solitary days traversing with camera in hand through the wonderful backstreets of shitamachi Tokyo.
Shitamachi translated literally means “downtown”, but a more nuanced translation is something along the lines of “home for the common people,” and the term is commonly used these days to describe those parts of Tokyo that have retained the feel of old Edo-era Tokyo, such as districts like Asakusa, Ueno and Yanaka.
I’ve always been taken with these parts of Tokyo, in large part because they tend to occupuy a prominent place as both subject and backdrop to the ukiyo-e woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Harunobu that are so dear to me. Much of the “floating world” tableau of the works by these two and other artists was centered on the old Edo-era pleasure quarter of Yoshiwara, where sophisticated and refined courtesans would entertain wealthy Edo-ites. I had always wanted to visit Yoshiwara, even back during my first trip here in 1997, but I was told it didn’t exist anymore. (Perhaps I had asked too directly?)
However, during my wanderings this past Saturday, which used Sensoji Temple as the anchor, I had the distinct feeling that the seemingly mythical pleasure quarter was within reach, if not geographically, then spiritually. I found myself meandering through the backstreets of Rokku, with its cheap foodstalls, mosaic-porn theaters, and off-track betting parlors, streets crammed full of oyaji with horse-racing tipsheets and glazed-over otaku faces and delinquent kids being questioned and Polaroided by police, in short what passes for seamy and seedy in safe and courteous Tokyo, and what my mother-in-law called an etchi neighborhood.
But as I continued to wander, further afield from the tourbus and tourguide-choked Sensoji, I soon found myself across the street from an imposing series of buildings that had all the markings of a real etchi (read: lewd) neighborhood: 3 or 4 men marking the entrance of each establishment with uniform black slacks, white long sleeve shirts and ties, and a row of taxis disgorging 50 year old-plus salarymen or young 20-something non-Japanese women. In other words, the unmistakable signs of a land of Soaplands. I remembered reading something somewhere that all that existed of refined Yoshiwara was some tawdry message parlors cum whorehouses. Could it be that I had found Yoshiwara?
I didn’t venture down the street (nor the second one I found that ran parallel to the first) — foreigners are usually not welcome at such establishments (unless they’re female and part of the usually Fillipino staff), and I didn’t feel walking down this gauntlet of soaplands with camera in hand would endear me to the intimidating taxi door openers. I dare imagine at any rate that these streets would have yielded few clues as to any history, if any at all, that they might have. Certainly there was no “Great Gate” as Yoshiwara had (apparently the only entrance into the quarter), but there was most definitely a figurative gate that barred my entrance.
Of course, being a much more fearless web wanderer, I have been poring through sites trying to determine if in fact Yoshiwara still exists. Nothing conclusive yet (and I have yet to broach the Japanese only sites), but I did run across a quite unexpected site with a map, some images, and a history of the old pleasure quarter. The site is the syllabus for a University of Delaware history course entitled Popular Culture in Urban Japan, and Yoshiwara forms just one part of a site that looks at other shitamachi parts of Tokyo, as well as manga and other aspects of Japanese pop culture. (Particulary worthwhile is the Online Resources section where Professor Gerald Figal has uploaded .pdf files of various texts he’s made required reading for his students.) Among the images on display is this one purportedly to be of a Yoshiwara building in the 1960’s. One of these days I’ll muster up the resolve to walk the soapland alleys I found and mine further whether I did indeed stumble across the the mythical Yoshiwara.
UPDATE: Professor Figal emailed me after I posted the above:
The answer to your Yoshiwara question is yes, the district still exists, but it’s a tawdry soapland (massage palors, sex shows, etc.) nowadays. You should venture out there some time to see for yourself!