Edo, the Pretext for the Age of Symbiosis
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Edo was the Greatest Urban Center of Popular Culture of Its Day
High Population Density and Non-verbal Communication
The Edo Rowhouse: An Urban Model
An Art of the Symbiosis of Abstraction and Realism Predating Picasso
The Intentional Artlessness of Sukiya-style Architecture
A Hybrid Style That Produced a Bold Synthesis of East and West
From a Choice Between Centralization and Decentralization to Centralization and Decentralization
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Edo was a Distinct and Highly Developed Modern Society
Recently, the rich and varied culture of Edo has been in the spotlight. Much has been published on the city, the period, and its culture. In the early 1960s, I predicted that Edo would be widely reappraised, and I studied the city from a variety of perspectives. I have emphasized the importance of Edo's Shitamachi, or downtown area; NOTE 1 the value of streets and alleys as opposed to plazas; I have researched the population density of Edo and the city's sukiya-style architecture; the automatons of the Edo period; the philosophy of Miura Baigan; I have collected and studied the woodblock prints of the last year of the Edo period; and the typically Edo-period color known as Rikyu gray. In 1981 I designed the Arts of Edo Exhibition exhibition space at the Royal Academy of Arts, and on that occasion I spoke at Oxford University on the subject of Edo and the present.
In my talk at Oxford, I stated by belief that "the Edo period -- or more broadly, the three-century span of purely Japanese culture from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century -- holds the roots of all that is Japan today." The major Japanese art traditions that survive today -- the way of tea (sado), flower arrangement (ikebana), the Noh and Kabuki dramas, Sukiya-style architecture -- all can be traced back to the latter half of sixteenth century and all gained popular acceptance in the Edo period. They flourished until the "reforms" of the Meiji era brought on a wholesale rejection of everything associated with the past. Certainly the new government, but also the populace, sought to disassociate itself from the feudal past in the push toward Westernization, even if that meant depreciating "premodern" life and culture.
With the opening to the West, architecture in Japan suddenly started copying Western architecture outright; Japanese took to wearing Western clothes. This seems to support the dogma that modern Japan began from the Meiji era. We often hear that Japan rose from backward country to an advanced industrial state in a little over a hundred years, and that the leaders of developing nations should look to Japan as a model for their next hundred years of growth. Such explanations, however, overlook a number of important facts.
As is gradually becoming clear, the Edo period saw grand achievements in mass culture and was far more "modern" than previously thought. Ronald Dore notes in his Education in Tokugawa Japan that by the end of the Edo period (1868), forty-three percent of boys and ten percent of girls between the ages of six and thirteen attended school -- higher percentages than in England at the time. Edo was the largest city in the world, with a population of well over a million. In scholarship, Yamagata Banto proposed a steady-state theory of the solar system in his Instead of Dreams (Yume no Shiro, 1820), NOTE 2 while Shizuki Tadao translated John Keill's commentaries on Newton's Principia only very shortly after they had reached France. NOTE 3 By the early nineteenth century, cartographer Ino Tadataka (1785-1818) had drawn accurate maps of the Japanese islands. NOTE 4 Moreover, in the 1770s, philosopher Miura Baien had set forth his dialectical system mentioned earlier in the three volumes Discourse on Metaphysics (Gengo), Discourse on Corollaries Zeigo), and Discourse on Morality (Kango), predating Hegel's dialectic by fifty years. Most important, however, Edo society had already attained its own unique modernity, quite distinct from Europe. No doubt the speed with which Japan was able to assimilate Western ideas and practices in the Meiji era, like a blotter absorbs ink, was in no small part due to the basically modern character of mature Edo society.
At this point I would like to discuss Japan's own unique and mature modern society of the Edo period, emphasizing that in that it is in that period which we should search for Japan's cultural roots.
Edo was the Greatest Urban Center of Popular Culture of Its Day
First, Edo Japan was a predominantly popular culture. In the eighth century, the total population of Japan was five million, and even a thousand years later, immediately prior to the Edo period, that figure had only just reached ten million. One hundred years into the Edo period, however, the population had tripled, so that by the time of shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune (1716-45) it had reached thirty million. This in itself made for accelerated urbanization.
The city of Edo, as we have seen, was the world's largest metropolis, with upwards of million inhabitants. Here flourished the world's first mass popular culture. The vast shrine and temple complexes of earlier ages gave way to the popular architecture of sukiya-style tea rooms, Kabuki, Noh, and Joruri theaters, as well as vernacular masterpieces in the forms of farmhouses and merchant townhouses. NOTE 5 As papermaking and woodblock printmaking techniques developed, and incredible amount of popular literature burst forth in the forms of romances, humor, and several varieties of picture books named after the color of their covers -- "blue books," folios, and "yellow covers" for adults, and "red books" and "black books" for children. Book stores sprang up all over Edo. The existence of popular entertainment genres and books for children are evidence of a very strong current of popular culture.
High Population Density and Non-verbal Communication
The second special feature of Edo was that it was a society with an extremely high population density, which resulted in the cultivation of subtle sensitivities. The average family home in Edo had a frontage of only two ken (about 3.6 meters), and the average family had six members. Under those circumstances, it was impossible for married couple to have a private bedroom. Without going nearly as far back as the Edo period, I remember that in my own childhood my parents slept in the same room with one child, and my grandparents slept in an adjoining room, with the other children. This was the norm in Japan previously.
In Tokyo today, there are some two hundred fifty people per hectare, which represents a high population density. But there were six hundred eighty-eight people per hectare in Edo. Tokyo may be densely populated, but it cannot compare with old Edo. With a city this crowded, one loud voice can irk scores of people. In Japanese there are the phrases, "The eyes are as eloquent as the lips" and "probing another's stomach." This communication of the eyes and the stomach -- which is the Chinese and Japanese metaphorical equivalent of the heart or breast in the West -- was a product of Edo's high population density.
In such a densely populated society, the slightest change in feeling or expression, gesture or attitude, can exert a great effect on interpersonal relationships. A subtle and refined sensitivity is fostered. It was this sensitivity that produced the subtle psychological dramas of the plays of the Kabuki theater known as sewamono, or domestic dramas. The heightened sensitivity to materials that characterizes sukiya-style architecture can also be traced back to these roots. From another perspective, feudal society with its rigid class distinctions, densely populated cities, and tight web of human relationships, did not permit the individual to expand his frame of reference and open his world out to broader horizons. Those conditions encouraged instead an intense turning in, concentration on and refinement of the internal world, which found expression in the human emotions of love, have, duty, and feeling; in an extreme sensitivity to the changes of the four seasons; and a love of plants and animals.
In modern city planning, high population density is regarded as an evil. The ideal is single-family dwellings spread out at a very low density among spacious parks and greenery, and today this is what the majority of the people seek as their ideal home. I am convinced, on the other hand, that it is far more natural for human beings to live together in relatively dense population environments. What are the best examples of the modern ideal of low-density urban populations? Canberra and Los Angeles. Yet the people of those cities and definitely not satisfied with their living environments. In Canberra, houses dot the open landscape at wide intervals. Is fruitful human interaction possible when you have to get in your car and drive to your nearest neighbor's home? And the high crime rate in Los Angeles testifies to the fact that low population density is not necessarily an urban plus.
With the advent of the information society, high urban population density is likely to be reappraised. The refined sensitivity that is fostered and honed by such environments will be important in the age of symbiosis, in which the ability to sense the thoughts of others and act toward them with consideration will be important emotional faculties.
The Edo Rowhouse: An Urban Model
Another trait of the Edo urban environment was its mixed, hybrid, pluralistic nature. The comic monologues of the Edo period regale us with the tales people by a cast of colorful characters that lived in the rowhouses, or nagaya, so characteristic of the city: the landlord, wise old sort, now retired; the stranger with a mysterious background; the ordinary-seeming young couple, actually the daughter of a feudal lord and the head clerk of a great merchant, who have eloped together and are in hiding; the quack doctor; the hardworking carpenter with a large brood of children; and many, many other interesting characters shared the same lodgings in the typical Edo nagaya.
The Edo period is often thought of as a time of strict division of the populace in social castes, with little opportunity for movement among them. But though externally these castes may have defined people's lives, internally a completely different principles was at work. The samurai class, for example, was actually very poor. The merchants, which were the lowest class officially, were in contrast relatively well off. Many of the merchant class were active as leaders of the intellectual world, too, particularly in the study of Western science, called Dutch Learning, or Rangaku. As a result, samurai had to swallow their pride and ask to be accepted as the disciples and pupils of these merchants. In other words, though an external class structure existed dividing the populace into samurai, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants, other class systems existed at the same time: an economic class system, an intellectual class system, and artistic class system. social relationships were defined by the overlapping combination of all these relationships. There was nothing strange about a samurai setting up shop as an umbrella maker next door to a carpenter's shop, for example.
In fact, the present is if anything more class conscious than the Edo period, as far as housing is concerned. For example, when a public housing project is designed, care in taken to insure that all of the units have a nearly equal quantity and quality of living space. Rent is calculated based on the price of land and the building costs. This is the so-called cost-price system. These uniform conditions insure that the people who move into the housing projects are very similar in social class. For example, if the rent is just about right for a couple in their thirties with one child, the housing project is very likely to full up with thousands or tents of thousands of couples in their thirties with a single child. The children that move in will all go to school at about the same time, and their fathers will all be at about the same step on the ladder of worldly success. The social environment of this housing project becomes, as a result, tremendously competitive. Which is more humane, the modern housing project or the Edo-period nagaya, populated by people of all ages, classes, and professions?
The separation of the social classes in modern society results in the exclusion of the weak from the social picture. The modern housing project is not a suitable place for the elderly or the handicapped to live. To avoid this unfortunate situation, I have always insisted that in designing public housing it is important to begin with a breakdown of the percentages of the different types of projected inhabitants, insuring that a wide variety of people will be able to live together in the projects. We must start by determining the ideal percentages of couples in their thirties and forties, couples in their sixties, handicapped people, and all other groups. Only when that has been determined can the real design and planning begin.
From more than two decades ago I have continued to insist that if homes for the elderly are to be built at all, they should be located next to day care centers. Then the elderly residents of the home would have a chance to play with the children, just as if they were their own grandchildren. The generations need places to come in contact with each other. Some people think that because the elderly are not very active, homes for them should be located in quiet places out in the midst of nature. This way of thinking reflects the coldness of modern society's functionalism and segregationism, which regards efficiency above all else. On the outskirts of San Francisco is a retirement community that was built quite some time ago. I visited the town as part of a survey I was conducting. The entire town has been constructed with the needs of the elderly in mind. Because many older people have trouble walking, the land is flat and the houses are all single-story dwellings. And because they tend to wake early, the dining hall opens at five a.m. for breakfast and the game room opens at six.
At first glance it really does seem a town designed entirely for the elderly. But after breakfast, almost the entire population of the community gathers in the game room and begins to play cards. This is indeed a strange sight. It speaks of world, a society that is so harsh that there is no place in it for the elderly, who must be segregated from the real world. In the week I spent interviewing the residents of this town, I learned that some sixty percent of them regarded the move there as a mistake. Living in an ordinary city has its inconveniences and it can be noisy, but at least there they could see their grandchildren and other, younger people. The consensus of the residents of this retirement community was that they should have stayed where they were. Unfortunately, in most cases the move has exhausted their life savings, and they were unable to return to the real world.
The segregationism of modern urban planning creates inhuman living environments like this. In New York, people are segregated according to race, in Chinatown, in Harlem, in Little Italy. In cities the world over, there is a conspicuous segregation by economic class. The high-density communities of Edo, in which different generations and classes lived together in symbiosis, offer us an important hint in urban planning of the future. It is also time to move away from national welfare policies that depend entirely on tax dollars and move toward a Japanese-style mutual-assistance welfare system of home-based welfare policy and local medical treatment, but his is a topic that I must save for another time.
An Art of the Symbiosis of Abstraction and Realism Predating Picasso
The third characteristic of Edo-period culture is its fictitious nature. The mysterious woodblock-print artist Sharaku, for example, draws the features of actors in a frankly exaggerated fashion, yet his work does not lose its realism. NOTE 6 In the pornographic prints called shunga the male organ may be depicted almost a meter in length, but remains effective because the same level of realism and stylistic technique that is used in the rest of the print is applied to it. The works of the Rimpa school of painters -- Koetsu, Sotatsu, Korin, and Kenzan among others -- are strongly fictitious in their structure, sharply in contrast to the concrete realism of their Western contemporaries. NOTE 7
The combination of abstract and realistic techniques that characterizes Modern Art in the West from the time of Picasso was already applied most effectively by Japanese artists some four centuries ago. Kabuki costumes and stylized kumadori makeup are additional examples of the characteristically Japanese combination of the abstract and real. NOTE 8 The ascent from fictitiousness to abstraction can be seen in other Edo-period arts as well, such as in Kimono patterns. These examples are strikingly similar to modern aesthetic tastes in their design and artistic conception.
The fictitious perception of culture in the Edo period can also be seen in the attitude of Edoites to nature. Edo was known to its inhabitants as the city of blossoms. In part this was a metaphor for the city's brilliant and flourishing culture, as the capital of the realm and the seat of the shogunate; but Edo was also extraordinary for the amount of greenery and flowers that it was wrapped in. Though the city lacked the public squares of London and the parks of Paris, the doorways and back yards of the homes of the people were lined with rows of potted bonsai, and in summer, morning glory and flowering gourd vines climbed the facades of Edo's buildings. There were nearly daily flower markets, and peddlers hawked flowers and potted plants throughout the city.
The bonsai of Japan are not accurate representations of nature. When the citizens of Edo looked at a bonsai pine they saw a hoary, thousand-year-old tree and heard the salt breezes of the sea shore. In the tiny tree they read a sign of nature. I applied the symbolic nature of bonsai in my design for the Prince Hotel in Roppongi. I placed a camphor tree in the center of the interior pool side area. The pool itself, set in the center of the building, is curved in shape, as a metaphor for the ocean. It is a small pool, not really large enough to be of much use, but the sides are made of acrylic so people can watch the swimmers and enjoy it as an image of the sea. The single tree set in the center of the pool side area is as fictitious as a bonsai, and like a bonsai, it stands as a metaphor for the forest. With that single tree, people can feel the coolness of shade in summer, imagine the soughing of the wind through its branches, and sense the arrival of autumn, seeing its fallen leaves.
The feudal lords in residence in Edo had official residences on plots near the shogun's castle assigned them by the shogunate. In addition, they built private residences farther from the castle, incorporating large gardens. Sukiya-style architecture also spread among the wealthier commoners, and with this a more highly developed awareness of the garden evolved. Japanese gardens, of course, have a long history, dating from the palace-style gardens of the Heian period and including the sand and stone Zen gardens of the medieval period, but gardens first enjoyed general popularity in the Edo period. Japanese gardens exhibit a high degree of abstraction and fiction. If you want to ocean in your garden, you dig a pond and read it as the sea. If you want islands, you place a big rock in the pond and view it as an island. Nature in this fashion is a man-made nature, a fictitious nature in the context of the densely populated city of Edo. Sukiya-style architecture itself, the tea house, built of wood, paper, and earth, is nothing more than a fiction for viewing nature.
The sort of androgyny of present-day idols such as Michael Jackson and Boy George was also quite popular in Edo, and this, too, is another example of a culture of fictions. The beauties depicted by the mid-Edo-period woodblock-print artist Suzuki Harunobu are as thin as Twiggy in her heyday, NOTE 9 They are rejections of female physicality, androgynous presents the exact opposite of a figure like Marilyn Monroe. In Kabuki, the convention of men playing the roles of women is exploited to present woman as fiction. The same impulse must have lead the geisha of the Fukagawa district of old Edo to adopt men's names. NOTE 10 This type of inversion is a kind of sophistication that is part of the essence of an ambiguous culture. A culture that pursues a straightforward manliness and femininity -- where all men are John Wayne and all women are Marilyn Monroe -- is based on a simplistic physicality. This is the aesthetic of the 1960s, when the goal of human life was thought to be material welfare, the aesthetic of Western-style Modernism. In contrast, a fictitiousness that allows men and women to exist in symbiosis is what is sought after in the present and will continue to be pursued in the future.
The femininization of men, the masculinization of women, and gay culture are not signs of the collapse of civilization. They are the pulse of a new aesthetic consciousness being born.
The Intentional Artlessness of Sukiya-style Architecture
The fourth trait of Edo-period culture is its preoccupation with detail. The work of the late Kobayashi Rekisai, a craftsman who specialized in making tiny models of everyday objects, transmits to us today this Edo-period fascination with detail. NOTE 11 Kobayashi stood in a long line of superb craftsmen, stretching back into the Edo period. Among his many amazing works is a writing box only a few millimeters in size, yet painstakingly decorated with inlaid maki-e designs. NOTE 12
There are many other examples at hand: the famous and finely detailed Edo komon kimono patterns, miniature books, Buddhist altars constructed as tiny miniatures of Buddhist temples. NOTE 13 The architecture of Edo period is also preoccupied with detail. The carvings that decorate the Toshogu shrine are an obvious example, and Edo-period castles, exemplified by Himeji Castle, exhibit a far greater wealth of design detail than their Momoyama-period predecessors.
Sukiya-style architecture, when compared to the palatial shoin style that preceded it, makes greater use of natural materials and a simple, even rough design. NOTE 14 But aside from the question of sheer amount of decorative detail, sukiya-style architecture shows great concern for the details and the proportions of the materials it uses. A naturally bent branch used in a sukiya-style work may at first seem to be an artless thing that might be picked up anywhere, but in fact that single branch was painstakingly selected from hundreds of naturally twisted branches, especially chosen to appear artless and natural.
The fifth trait of Edo-period culture is its symbiosis of technology and humanity, what I call the concept of karakuri, or the automation. In contrast to the West, where technology is opposed to humanity, technology in Japan has traditionally been regarded as an extension of humanity, something that can exist in symbiosis with humanity. I will discuss this idea further in chapter 9, "Karakuri."
A Hybrid Style That Produced a Bold Synthesis of East and West
The sixth trait of Edo-period culture was the development of a hybrid style of architecture. Carpenters in the Edo period freely combined the styles of all previous ages, making them live together in symbiosis and creating a unique hybrid style. The Hiunkaku, or Flying Cloud Pavilion, of the Nishi Honganji temple in Kyoto is a masterpiece of the hybrid style of the early Edo period. NOTE 15 The sukiya-style was born from the mating of the residential shoin style and the soan, or grass hut, style of tea room architecture. NOTE 16 The Joan of Oda Uraku is a masterpiece of this hybrid tea room architecture.
Another style that gained popularity in the Edo period was the so-called gongen, or avatar, style of architecture. NOTE 17 The Toshogu shrine is the outstanding example of this style, which was a combination of Buddhist and shinto architectural styles (its name derives from the concept that Shinto deities were avatars of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas). The carpenters' manual known as the "Transmission of Shrine Architecture" (Jingu Soden) that was secretly handed down through the Kenninji lineage of carpenters contains instructions for linking the main hall and the worship hall of a Shinto shrine with a stone-floored room, a combination of Buddhist and Shinto architectural styles. Relatively early works such as the tomb of Daitokuin, Sugen'in, Gen'yuin and Joken'in in Ueno, and the tomb of Bunshoin in Chiba can be regarded as precursors of the gongen style. By the mid-Edo period, full-blown examples abound: Yushima Temmangu shrine, Kanda Myojin shrine, Kamakura Hachimangu shrine, Nezu Gongen shrine, Kameido Temmangu shrine, and Tomioka Hachiman shrine.
From the start, Japanese culture was a skillful combination and synthesis of different cultures, and a hybrid style of architecture is definitely not anomalous in Japanese history. But this hybridization reached its peak in the Edo period. To put it another way, it was an era of architectural methodology, when the method of design and construction was given great importance. This tradition of hybridization reached its fruition in the hybrid Eastern-Western architecture from the late Edo through the Meiji period. The Tsukiji Hotel, The First National Bank of Tokyo, Mitsuigumi Headquarters at Nihombashi, and the foreign merchants' houses in Yokohama are all representative works of this style. Most of the buildings were the result of the bold attempts of contemporary master carpenters to incorporate Western styles into their works. In doing so, they produced buildings with a naive yet creative blending of East and West.
The arch of the gate of the Tsukiji Hotel, for example, suggests Islamic architecture. The building itself is a dramatic combination of diverse and hybrid elements: crisscross lathe and plaster outer walls, bell-shaped and round windows in the tower, hipped Western-style roof, a weathercock, and the red-lacquered sash and frame construction. At the same time, as a work of architecture it clearly surpasses any of the imitations of Western architecture produced in Japan from the mid-Meiji period on. This is because it was designed before Japan had accepted the values of Western culture as its own; the beauty of the Tsukiji Hotel is the product of the collision of two different cultures and their symbiotic synthesis.
The Tsukiji Hotel was built by the founder of the present Shimizu Construction Company, Shimizu Kisuke, with the help of foreign architects.
Once when I was talking with the British architectural critic Sir James Richards, I asked him what work of Japanese architecture he thought would go down in world architectural history. "Since you're still alive," he replied, "I will refrain from commenting on the present. But as far as the past is concerned, I think the hybrid style of architecture represented by the Tsukiji Hotel is what history will remember."
Unfortunately, due to of the Meiji government's determined policy of Westernization, the value of this hybrid architecture was not recognized. Since it was regarded as stylistically impure, it was destroyed. In the Meiji period, the symbiotic culture of the Edo period was rejected as backward and chaotic. "Edo is your parents' enemy," declared the Meiji reformer, statesman, and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi. With the Meiji era, the age of modernization and the "pure" Westernization of Japan began.
I have been gathering materials for over twenty years with the purpose of recreating these works of hybrid architecture, most of which have been lost to us. The richest source of documentation is to be found in woodblock prints of the period, the so-called Yokohama prints and "Civilization" (kaika) prints. NOTE 18 The major themes of woodblock prints were beauties and actors, but from the last years of the Edo period on into early Meiji, prints illustrating foreigners and their customs were also popular. These lively prints depicted the subjects and symbols of the new "civilization and enlightenment" that the government aimed for, and showed such scenes as Western ships, steam locomotives, foreign dress and accessories, and foreigners disporting in the brothels and gay quarters. The hybrid architecture of the age was also a popular subject, and many works are shown in prints.
Among woodblock print artists, those of the Utagawa lineage were especially active in producing these prints, in particular the disciples of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, including Yoshitora, Yoshiki, and Yoshitoshi. The disciples of Toyokuni III -- Tadahide, Kunichika, Kunihisa, and Kunitsuna -- also produced many civilization and enlightenment prints. In the Hiroshige lineage, Hiroshige II, Hirochika, and Shigenobu were active in this genre, and as we enter the Meiji period, Hiroshige III, Kuniteru, and Kunimasa produced a great number of these prints. Yokohama prints and Civilization prints were produced for a period of about twenty years, spanning the last decade of the Edo period and the first decade of Meiji. Some eighty percent were created in the years from 1860 to 1865. in 1868, the last year of the old regime and the first year of Meiji, Tokyo's harbor was opened to foreign ships, and popular interest began to move from Yokohama to Tokyo. In general, then, the Yokohama prints depicted scenes in and around Yokohama, and the Civilization prints showed scenes of Tokyo.
It's my ambition to recreate the plans for these works of East-West hybrid architecture depicted in the woodblock prints but otherwise lost to posterity. I believe that it is in these architectural works that we can discover the tremendous dynamism of Japanese aesthetic of symbiosis and that from in the process of recreating these works we will also discover the true path that Postmodern Architecture should take as it transcends the limits of Modernism.
From a Choice Between Centralization and Decentralization to Centralization and Decentralization
The seventh special characteristic of Edo-period culture is the symbiosis of part and whole under the system of the centralized shogunate and the de centralized fief governments. The shogunate determined all national policy; it was a centralized administrative system with an enormous amount of power. But from the mid-Edo period on, the shogunate, in financial difficulties partly because of the enormous expense incurred in the construction of the Toshogu shrine, encouraged each of the fiefs to develop their own economies. The Satsuma fief in Kyushu developed cut glass wares, and Nagasaki encouraged the manufacture of blown glass. Ako was known for its salt production and Kanazawa for its Kutani ceramic ware and Wajima lacquerware. Wakayama also produced lacquerware, and Ibaraki was famous for its Yuki tsumuhi cloth. Oita manufactured a special kind of tatami matting and Tosa supplied camphor. All of these were fief-run local industries.
In intellectual circles, too, each fief had its own educational system of village schools and fief academies. In addition, private institutes were established to teach specialized studies, such as Western studies, Neo-Confucianism, and military strategy, the art of poetry, and various practical skills. At the crown of these local systems was the Shoheiko academy in Edo, the official academy of the shogunate. But after the Meiji Restoration, Japan's educational system has gradually become more and more centralized and standardized. The slogan of educators since World War II has been education for democracy, and under that banner what little individuality remained among the secondary schools and universities of the nation has been sacrificed to the creation of a completely standardized education paid for out of the public purse.
The reevaluation of Japan's educational system that was initiated during the Nakasone administration suggested reforming the system by reintroducing more freedom and individuality, but the fact is that we could learn much along these lines by looking back at the educational systems during the Edo period.
The shogunate's policy of requiring the feudal lords to commute back and forth from their fiefs to Edo contributed greatly to the development of communication and transportation networks linking Edo to the fiefs, but still the fiefs were not absorbed into the central government, and each retained sufficient independence and vitality as a part or a region of the nation as a whole. This precedent should serve as a guide to us today. It teaches us that we are not forced to make a choice between centralization and decentralization; we can have both, in the ideal model offered us by Edo.
The cities of the Federal Republic of Germany are European example of the success of decentralization. Since Berlin was divided into eastern and western sectors and the capital of the republic was moved to Bonn, the cities of Germany have been decentralized to an almost ideal degree. Frankfurt, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Bonn, Munich, and Stuttgart are all cities of from one million to three million; no huge urban megalopolis like Tokyo dominates. Each region has its own universities and newspapers, independent and individual in character. The country itself is a federal republic, and historically the individual states have always been strongly independent.
Even so, recently some have urged that the Berlin, one of the great world cities in the 1920s, be restored as the capital of West Germany. Their argument is that without the culture of a great capital city, their country cannot be an international center. In France, on the other hand, everything is concentrated in Paris, and not single Frenchman objects to this. Yet the French value each of the regions of their country for its unique culture, its atmosphere, its local wine, and its more relaxed pace of life. While all Frenchmen are proud of their great capital of Paris, the others regions of France exist in symbiosis with the center.
In this context, the current criticism in Japan concerning the concentration of the country's energies and resources in Tokyo seems to be exaggerated. The goal is to assure that the great cities and the other regions of the country all develop on their own, in a simultaneously centralized and decentralized fashion. And that is why the model of the shogunate and the fiefs is such an apt one as we face the future.
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Footnotes:
1. Shitamachi, or the "low city," is now east central and northeast Tokyo. It was traditionally the area in which the townsmen and craftsman of the city lived, as opposed to the feudal lords and their entourages, who lived "in the hills," the Yamanote area. Sometimes translated as Downtown, the Shitamachi district preserves more of the old character of Tokyo-Edo than other parts of the city.
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2. Yamagata Banto (1748-1821) was a scholar of the merchant class. He was adopted at thirteen by his uncle and moved to Ssaka, where be became the manager of a rice business. While carrying on his trade he also studied Confucianism, astronomy, and Western science, or Rangaku, and composed several works in addition to Instead of Dreams. That work is divided into twelve sections, on astronomy, geography, mythology, history, government policies, economics, and other miscellaneous subjects. The section on astronomy is especially well-known. Banto's achievements as an economist and thinker are rank him with his contemporaries in Europe, America, and Asia.
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3. Shizuki Tadao (1760-1808) was a scholar of Western science, or Rangaku who translated many Dutch works and can claim many compositions of his own as well. His main work is Reki Sho Shin Sho, a translation from Dutch of the an original English commentary on Newton's Principia. The theory of the Earth's movement appears there, and Tadao's appended theory of the origin of stars rivals and Kant-Laplace hypothesis.
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4. Ino Tadataka (1745-1818) is famous as a cartographer, but until he was fifty he was the manager of a brewery. It was only after retirement that he began to study astronomy, geography, and mathematics and began drawing maps. In sixteen years starting from 1800, he spent 3,736 days traveling around Japan and charted 43,708 terrestrial miles, taking several hundreds of thousands of readings. His maps are accurate to about a thousandth of a degree. Though Ino's maps were not in use during the Edo period, they were made the standard maps of the country in the Meiji era.
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5. Joruri is the name of the puppet theater, often called Bunraku today. In the Joruri theaters, serious dramas were enacted for an audience of adults. The large puppets were eventually operated by three puppeteers dressed in black and visible from the waist up. The drama was accompanied by ballad narrative called Joruri, which gave its name to the theatrical genre.
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6. The dates of Toshusai Sharaku's birth and death are unknown, but he was active in the late Edo period, that is, the eighteenth century. His output of more than 140 prints in concentrated between May 1794 and January 1795, and after that he seems to have cut his ties to the world of woodblock prints and we know very little more of him. Various theories about his true identity have been suggested, but there is not enough evidence to confirm any of them.
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7. The Rimpa school of painting started around 1600 by Sotatsu. it was also associated with his contemporary Hon'ami Koetus. The paintings of this school are characterized by their decorativeness, delicate shading and coloring, and the abstraction of their layout and design. Though the Rimpa painters were keen observers of nature, their work is highly stylized. Sotatsu was active in Kyoto from 1600 to 1640. Hon'ami Koetsu (1558-1637) was widely admired for his calligraphy, pottery, and lacquer designs, and encouraged Sotatsu by giving him many painting commissions. Ogata Korin (1658-1716) is known for his gorgeous screen paintings in rich colors against gold grounds. Ogata Kenzan (1663-1743) was potter as well as painter, and combined the rigor of the Chinese literati style of painting with Japanese decorativeness.
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8. Kumadori makeup, in contrast to the makeup of Peking Opera, for example, is based on the muscles of the face, but abstracted from there to a realm of stylization. It is said to have been influenced by the iconography of Buddhist images, especially those of fierce guardian deities such as Fudo Myoo.
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9. Suzuki Harunobu (died in1770) was the originator of the multicolored woodblock print, or nishiki-e. In addition to his prints of beautiful women (bijinga), he designed many scenes of loving couples and sights of daily life about town. He is often regarded as having introduced the sophisticated beauty of aristocratic art into the woodblock print, but his role in commercializing the print is probably even more important.
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10. Fukagawa still exists, though it is no longer the red-light district it once was. As a brothel district, it had a reputation for a lower (and cheaper) class of courtesan than its rivals in Yoshiwara and Shinagawa. Many courtesans took male names as professional names. It produced a refined and satiric dandyism that Edoites enjoyed immensely.
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11. Kobayashi Rekisai (1884-1959) was a maker of miniatures, including tiny and accurately crafted ink boxes, incense stands, dressers, samisens, and other furniture and accessories.
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12. Maki-e is a process in which mother-of-pearl, gold, dust, and other decorations are embedded in lacquerware, creating beautiful and painterly designs.
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13. Komon means small crest or design. Edo komon is characterized by a repeat pattern of tine motifs and is produced with a paste-resist dyeing techniques.
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14. In the shoin style of residential palace architecture, several large buildings are linked by elevated, roofed corridors. The main building is open to the south, and together the typical shoin layout forms a U, with a garden including a pond enclosed in its middle. The design details of shoin-style architecture are relatively formal and elaborate.
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15. The Flying Cloud Pavilion is located in the southeastern corner of the Nishi Honganji temple compound. It is said to have originally been part of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Juraku no Tei palace, which would mean Hiunkaku was built in around 1586 or 1587. Another theory suggests that it was built on its present site in the early 1600s. It has an unconventional design, containing shoin-style rooms. a steam bath, and a famous tea room.
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16. The soan style refers to the simplest and most austere type of tea house or tea room design, in which the structure is modeled after a hermit's hut. Simple, homely materials are used in a style that is at once rough and highly sophisticated.
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17. From the tenth century in Japan a theory was current that stated that Buddhist deities truly existed and Shinto deities did not; what appeared to be Shinto deity was only the manifestation of a Buddhist deity in Shinto form. This doctrine was an attempt to establish the preeminence of Buddhism over the native religion. It resulted in a doubling of deities, a multivalence of the sacred.
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18. The Civilization prints showed scenes of the latest Western inventions (railroads, steamboats, curling irons), fashions, and even scenes of Westerners and Western capitals. The Yokohama prints specialized in scenes of Westerners and their activities in the port of Yokohama, where a Western settlement had been established.
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