Tokyo vernacular : common spaces, local histories, found objects / Jordan Sand.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sand, Jordan, 1960-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Architecture--Government policy.

History.

Architecture.

Historic buildings--Conservation and restoration.

Historic preservation.

Tokyo (Japan)--History--1945-.

Tokyo (Japan).

Historic preservation--Japan--Tokyo--History--20th century.

Historic buildings--Conservation and restoration--Japan--Tokyo--History--20th century.

Historic buildings.

Architecture--Government policy--Japan--Tokyo--History--20th century.

Japan--Tokyo.

Physical Description:

xiii, 208 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2013.

Summary:

Preserved buildings and historic districts, museums and reconstructions: all have become an important part of the landscape and cultural heritage of cities around the world. In the 1970s, Tokyo began to participate in this trend of conserving and celebrating the past. However, repeated episodes of destruction and continuous redevelopment had left the city with few buildings of recognized historical value. Late twentieth-century Tokyo thus presents an illuminating case of a new sense of history emerging in the city's physical environment-one that required both a shift in perceptions of value and a search for the past in the margins and interstices of a rapidly modernizing cityscape. In Tokyo Vernacular, Jordan Sand shows how the rediscovered past was mobilized as part of a new politics of the everyday following the failure of mass movements in 1960s Japan. Where earlier activists had conceived of Tokyo as a national center and public space as the venue for expressing national citizenship, the post-1960s generation came to value local places and objects that embodied the vernacular language of the city. In doing so, they laid claim to common property outside the spaces of corporate capitalism and the state. Scholarship to date has tended to view historicism in the postindustrial context either as a genuine response to loss or as a cynical commodification of nostalgia. Tokyo's experience suggests other interpretations. Moving from the politics of the public square to the invention of neighborhood community, from oddities found and appropriated in the streets to the exhibition of everyday scenes and artifacts in museums, Tokyo Vernacular traces the rediscovery of the past-sometimes in unlikely forms-in a city with few traditional landmarks. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction

Hiroba : the public square and the boundaries of the commons

Yanesen : writing local community

Deviant properties : street observation studies

Museums, heritage, and everyday life : from exoticism to common heritage

Conclusion : history and memory in a city without monuments.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780520275669

0520275667

9780520280373

0520280377

OCLC:

838792330