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Edward G. Seidensticker (1921–2007)

Autor(a) de Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake

19+ Works 628 Membros 13 Críticas 1 Favorited

About the Author

Seidensticker, noted translator of the Tale of Genji and contemporary Japanese novels. (Bowker Author Biography)
Image credit: Wikipedia

Obras por Edward G. Seidensticker

Associated Works

The Tale of Genji (2015) — Tradutor, algumas edições5,485 exemplares
Terra de Neve (1947) — Tradutor, algumas edições3,285 exemplares
As irmãs Makioka (1943) — Tradutor, algumas edições2,159 exemplares
In Praise of Shadows (1933) — Tradutor, algumas edições2,006 exemplares
Thousand Cranes (1952) — Tradutor, algumas edições1,705 exemplares
The Master of Go (1954) — Tradutor, algumas edições1,264 exemplares
The Sound of the Mountain (1954) — Tradutor, algumas edições1,225 exemplares
Some Prefer Nettles (1929) — Tradutor, algumas edições; Introdução, algumas edições1,058 exemplares
The Decay of the Angel (1971) — Tradutor, algumas edições1,034 exemplares
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories (1953) — Tradutor, algumas edições864 exemplares
House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories (1969) — Tradutor, algumas edições570 exemplares
The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan (Tuttle Classics) (1989) — Tradutor, algumas edições321 exemplares
Modern Japanese Literature: From 1868 to the Present Day (1956) — Tradutor, algumas edições287 exemplares
The Sea of Fertility (1971) — Tradutor, algumas edições223 exemplares
Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology (1962) — Tradutor — 161 exemplares
The Izu Dancer and Other Stories (1974) — Tradutor, algumas edições135 exemplares
Snow Country / Thousand Cranes (1958) — Tradutor, algumas edições101 exemplares
Lou-lan (1968) — Tradutor, algumas edições67 exemplares
Shadows of the Rising Sun: A Critical View of the Japanese Miracle (1983) — Prefácio, algumas edições31 exemplares
Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji: The Manga Edition (2022) — Contribuidor — 18 exemplares

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome legal
Seidensticker, Edward George
Data de nascimento
1921-02-11
Data de falecimento
2007-08-26
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
VS
Local de nascimento
Castle Rock, Colorado, USA
Locais de residência
Tokyo, Japan
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
Educação
Harvard University
University of Tokyo
Ocupações
vertaler Japans - Engels
Prémios e menções honrosas
Order of the Rising Sun, 3rd class

Membros

Críticas

Three stars is MY PERSONAL RATING, based on what I was hoping for. I would give it five stars if I was a total obsessive about Tokyo, was a student of architectural history, was writing a doctoral thesis on the development of Tokyo social class or was the Minister of Tourism for Tokyo. I am none of these. Just a casual observer with a liking for Japanese aesthetics.

Seidensticker is a sociogeo-gnostic. Be prepared for a butt-kicking.
 
Assinalado
chriszodrow | Jun 23, 2013 |
Flâner à Tokyo

Edward Seidensticker's Tokyo Rising, the sequel to the almost equally engaging Low City, High City : Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake, is a treasure trove of the breathtaking changes that Tokyoites’ public life went through from 1923 until the height of the Japanese bubble. Just like Low City, High City, Tokyo Rising does not contain much political, economic, intellectual or literary history, but seems more like what an intellectual remembered of the time and what he had read in the newspaper. Still the author deserves praise for making all these data available, and still managing to turn the book into a coherent story. On the other hand, it is not very clear what someone who does not live in Tokyo or is a regular visitor can learn from this book.

Roughly speaking, the book is about the decline of Tokyo’s Low City in the East and the rise of the High City in the West. The disastrous Kanto earthquake of 1923 speeded up that process. Tokyo was rebuilt with cheaper international devices in lighter colours than before (page 23). After the earthquake retail merchandising, entertainment and culture imitated and emulated what the Japanese had observed in New York and London. Old shop signs, often abstract and symbolic, gave way to signs that announced their business loudly and unequivocally. People stopped changing from street wear into slippers when entering a store, and as shops ceased visiting people at home, matrons had to start mingling with the lesser orders. In 1926, the first vending machines were introduced. Mitsukoshi Department Store included a theatre in its post-earthquake building. All such stores had gardens, terraces, galleries and exhibition halls. Department stores were built at commuter transfer points like Shibuya and Shinjuku. The early era saw the start of suburbanisation with bunka jutaku ("cultural dwellings"): houses with 3-4 rooms, one in Western style, 2 floors, a tiled kitchen and a bath. This lead to the demise of public baths, once an important element of Japanese culture. In the Japanese language, neologisms were mainly foreign imports.

Industrialisation progressed and 1927 saw the introduction of the underground railway. Shinjuku was up and coming and less bourgeois with market stalls and phonographs. It was probably already the most crowded place in the city with flower sellers and fortune-tellers (page 51). The bars in Ginza had French names, and young men no longer came to look at women and listen to their traditional music. The women were becoming more aggressive and less inhibited, and emerged to take charge of conversation. The waitress gave way to the hostess (page 61). Prices came forward and so did the tips. Other changes were the growing popularity of Osaka cooking (Osaka being the challenger/runner-up in many fields), and sumo and kabuki, that started to attract millions of visitors.

1940, the year Japan was 2600 years old, should have brought the Olympics, but Japan returned the franchise. Because of the Sino-Japanese war steel was in short supply. Foreign-named cigarettes were rebranded, but mama and papa could not be extirpated anymore. To support the war effort the nation turned to technology and production, with ersatz to satisfy the populace. Still, the suicide rate went down. And despite the purification of culture, German, Italian, and Russian classical music were still allowed.

The first American air raid hit Tokyo in 1942, but the second one only came in 1944. A total of 4,000 flights occurred over the city. After the war the Americans settled in Marunouchi, and Tokyo was rebuilt on the old street pattern. Japan profited handsomely from the Korean War, which helped rebuild the city. Tokyo needed about a decade to recover from the war. The occupation force mainly censored acts of military virtues like loyalty, but allowed the first kisses on stage and screen. They were soon followed by strip shows. Strippers in Asakusa first wore Japanese dress, while their colleagues in Ginza wore Western dress and Shinjuku was in between. However, soon Ginza was the norm because the clothes went off faster. Another form of amusement of the time was women's swordplays.

The fifties saw the invention of pachinko. Speed and noise increased with these vertical pinball machines:

It does seem to be the case that the Japanese would prefer to be knocked into happy oblivion by sheer noise than by most things.

Car traffic increased to 2.5 million in the mid 1960's, and tramways were done away with before the Olympics. The Tokyo Olympics were the first in Asia, and were supposed to remedy the strong feelings of inferiority and isolation that had persisted. The Olympics led to 20 miles of motorways, the "bullet train" to Osaka, and a monorail to the airport. However t the time only a third of the people outside the centre had access to sewers (page 234). At the Olympics Japan won gold in women's volleyball, but wept for losing the final in open-weight judo.

In these years Harajuku came up as a place for youth culture. Up to the oil crisis of 1973, Japan experienced quickly rising wealth and Tokyo ever more cars. The parking-lot business began. In 1963 it was made illegal to keep the family automobile in the street space in front of the family house. "Key child" was one of the new words of 1964 (it equally existed in Holland in the early 1970's), and in the next year the first newspaper article about fat children appeared. "Tribes" of young people came up, among others in Harajuku:

It is more likely rebellion against the boredom of peace, prosperity, and the life of the office worker and the spouse.

Tokyo got its first high rise buildings of over 200 metres. Golf overtook sumo as a popular diversion for the elite, which the author blames on the demise of the geisha. The golf course became increasingly the place for big deals, despite that it takes dozens of evenings at an expensive geisha restaurant to spend a sum equal to the membership fee in one of the golf clubs.

In the mean time Japan and Tokyo developed what is now known as one of the greatest bubble economies of the 20th century:

One of the most popular little stunts at drinking places has to do with the ten-thousand-yen banknote and the price of land. The note, the largest printed by the Japanese government, is worth about eighty dollars, though the value shifts from day to day. A person is told to fold one of the notes as tightly as possible. Take it down to Ginza and drop it, the instructions continue; it will not buy the bit of land upon which it falls.

This is somewhat overstating it, but a 200 square feet flat in Tokyo costed about 1 million US dollar. Land speculation caused Tokyo house prices to rise at about three times the national rate. Japan’s concentration of money and power (and consequently head offices and artists) was unthinkable in the United States. And as a consequence, Yokohama, Tokyo’s satellite city, was larger than Osaka, the country’s third city.

So Tokyo is and has almost everything, and many a son of the city might say it has lost the most important thing, its identity. (...) The loss of identity is the result of the very Japanese process of homogenisation. Everything is subsumed unto Tokyo and Tokyo is subsumed unto everything; and the nation marches victoriously on, untroubled by the insistence on separateness and difference that troubles so many other nations.
… (mais)
3 vote
Assinalado
mercure | 1 outra crítica | Feb 7, 2011 |
Civilisation and Enlightenment

Low City, Big City is a description of Tokyo during the period that Japan caught up with Western powers after centuries of near isolation. The book does not contain much political, economic, intellectual or literary history, but seems more like an intellectual remembering what he read in the local newspaper. It covers Tokyo during the Meiji and Taishi emperors, and roughly matches a Chinese sexagenary cycle. The title refers to Yamanote as the High City of the intellectual and financial elite, and Shitamachi as the more dynamic Low City of merchants and artisans, and Mr. Seidensticker’s favourite. The book contains some copies of woodblock prints made during this period, depicting interesting, gay coloured scenes of Japan's transition.

At the end of the Tokugawa era in 1863, Edo was more like Washington than London or Paris. As a centre of government, it was not yet a great commercial centre. Edo’s economy was seriously affected by the fact that iIn 1862 Daimyo families were no longer required to live in Edo. Many left, and the population fell from over one million to half a million. With the name change to Tokyo (i.e. Eastern Capital), and the emperor's move from Kyoto to Tokyo, Tokyo started growing again, mainly by attracting people from Japan's northeast. Tokyo was a low rise city, with lots of open spaces, like a collection of villages, with transportation often on foot or by boot. Mr. Seidensticker quotes an attendant of General Grant during his visit to the city in 1879:

There is no special character to Tokio, no one trait to seize upon and remember, except that the aspect is that of repose

Earth quakes and fires were a regular feet of the city, and the city was rebuilt regularly, and almost completely after the great earth quake of 1923, that killed about 100,000 people in which was essentially still a wooden city.

With Japan opening up to the outside world, brick buildings are erected, and gas lights introduced. The first form of transportation on wheels is the rickshaw, a Tokyo original. They would later be replaced by horse-drawn buses, soon electric trams, and trains.

A cultural caesura happens in 1873 when the empress stops blackening her teeth. That year already a third of Tokyo men had cropped hair in the Western style. It doubled in 7 years. Many important changes occur in these years, including like driving on the left, reading from left to right, the introduction of beer, meat and dairy products, the appearance of the first Chinese restaurant, and the fad for rabbits with large floppy ears as pets. The 17th century dry goods store Mitsui (now known as Mitsukoshi) transforms itself into a department store, drawing crowds with culture and entertainment. It becomes a mandatory part of a tour of Tokyo for country folk. Its competitor Shirokiya brought shop girls as innovation. By 1923, two thirds of men wore Western dress in 1923, although women clung to traditional dress longer:

The relationship between tradition and change in japan has always been complicated by the fact that change itself is tradition.

According to Mr. Seidensticker, Tokyo has always been a fun city. Performances and festivals have always been central to Edo and Tokyo culture. Kabuki theatre, the tea ceremony, and elegant "pleasure quarters" of Yoshiwara were important manifestations of this culture. They were considered decadent by Tokugawa bureaucrats. However refined may have been the trappings of the theatre and of its twin the pleasure quarter, sex lay behind them, and worse, the purveying of sex. During the Meiji, the vulgarity is taken out of Kabuki theatre, and its image is consequently upgraded. It was accomplished with new theatres and the imperial family attending plays. Yose, vaudeville was the favourite form of theatre for the poor. The grounds of the larger shrines and temples were often pleasure centres also. The Asakusa Kannon was one vast and miscellaneous emporium for the performing arts. Sumo wrestling was also made acceptable by imperial viewing, and women were gradually allowed to attend this sport with religious significance. At the same time Yoshiwara decayed into prostitution, and tea houses started to operate as liaisons between geishas and wealthy merchants.

Nihombashi became a conservative area of town, whereas the Ginza with its main road of brick buildings became innovative and nouveau riche. Ginza was also the home of Seiko and Shiseido (by a pharmacist who first experimented with soap, toothpaste and ice cream). Earlier generations of rich Tokyoites had a Western building for receiving guests, but lived in more traditional premises themselves. Many shogunate estates gave way to public buildings.

The reign of Taisho saw the emergence of specialist schools and the office lady. During this era cars and motor cycles were introduced, as was asphalt in Ginza. Sanitation and sewage still primitively collected. In the 1920’s still only 20% of the mass was collected.

Farmers, in the days that they bought, were willing to pay more for sewage the higher the social level of the house. The upper-class product was richer in nutriment, apparently. So, apparently, was male excrement. In aristocratic mansions where the latrines were segregated by sex, male sewage was more highly valued than female. It seems that the female physique was more efficient.
… (mais)
½
 
Assinalado
mercure | 2 outras críticas | Jan 10, 2011 |
I am a big fan of Seidensticker; one of the biggest, I am sure. Seidensticker mentioned this book in his memoir, Tokyo Central, saying that he had a hard time publishing it, even though he thought it better than a number of other books on the market. I will agree, to an extent; it's not the worst book I read this year. Unfortunately, it was fairly close.

This is an epistolary novel, with letters going between two Americans, Mr. George Brown and Prof. Hilda Gray, and a Japanese woman, Yoko Shiraito. From these, a plot emerges, even if haltingly: Shiraito works in a company where something shady is going on, and her sister is involved in a student revolt; Brown is a journalist working to find out what's happening in the company, and likely has an affair with Shiraito; Gray is friends with first Brown and then Shiraito, and is working on the women's movement in Japan.

It's hard to figure out all the plot, even by the end of the book, since it's written in an oblique way. This is an attempt by Seidensticker to get in the Japanese lyrical style, where people rarely come out and say anything, and that's fine, as it goes, as long as you can actually tell if you read between the lines what happened. With the corruption storyline, I'm not sure you can, though, so that's a problem.

The worst parts, though, are stylistic, sadly. The letters are written in the classical Japanese style, so there's a lot of talk about the weather at the start of each, a short poem, and well-wishes at the end. This is okay, say, for a short story, but 67 letters over a little under 200 pages, and you hear a lot about the weather, and not enough about the plot.

Also, Seidensticker gets cutesy and makes reference both to himself (and not even slyly) and to personality, although you have to know Japanese to get it (an unsexy person is named Mr. Irokenai; the head of the corrupt corporation is named Mr. Kuromaku; etc.). That might fly in a farce, but this isn't one, and so it really detracts from it.

It's not bad; the characters are all right, at least, and there's some good Seidensticker wit in it, but all in all, it's disappointing. I can't really recommend this one to anyone except those like me: diehard Seidensticker fan. And even to them, it's only a curiosity.
… (mais)
½
 
Assinalado
WinterFox | Sep 1, 2008 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
19
Also by
20
Membros
628
Popularidade
#40,132
Avaliação
3.9
Críticas
13
ISBN
28
Línguas
2
Marcado como favorito
1

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