Tokyo
Subtitle: a spatial anthropology
By: Jinnai Hidenobu ; translated by Kimiko Nishimura.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 236
Subjects: City planning -- Japan -- Tokyo -- History; Open spaces -- Japan -- Tokyo -- Planning -- History; Urban anthropology; Tokyo (Japan) -- Social conditions
Other titles: Spatial anthropology
Description: The internationally known Japanese architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu set out on foot to rediscover the city of Tokyo. Armed with old maps, he wandered through back alleys and lanes, trying to experience the city's space as it had been lived by earlier residents. He found that, despite an almost completely new cityscape, present-day inhabitants divide up Tokyo in much the same way that their ancestors did two hundred or even three hundred years before.

In Tokyo Jinnai presents a detailed picture of how people lived in the seventeenth-century metropolis of Edo (renamed Tokyo during the Meiji Restoration in 1868). He leads his readers through the streets of the city, tracing the physical, architectural changes that took place over subsequent centuries as the people of Tokyo adapted to new technologies while attempting to preserve what they valued of their old living patterns.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 221-224) and index.