Imagining Great Tokyo: The Modern Metropolis in Text and Image

Abstract

This paper examines textual and pictorial representations of Tokyo in the late 1920s, focusing on the essay collection 'Tales of Great Tokyo Prosperity' (Dai Tōkyō hanjōki, 1927). Originally published in the evening edition of the Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun, the collection features eighteen essays by a group of prominent authors that includes Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Izumi Kyōka, Tayama Katai, and Shimazaki Tōson, with accompanying illustrations by artists such as Kimura Shōhachi, Kishida Ryūsei, and Kaburagi Kiyokata. 'Tales of Great Tokyo Prosperity' was published at a time when the Japanese capital was enjoying a dramatic resurgence following the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. Yet in many of these essays, each of which describes a different Tokyo neighborhood, a deeply elegiac tone prevails. I argue that 'Tales of Great Tokyo Prosperity,' comprising two volumes devoted to the low city (shitamachi) and the high city (yamanote), constitutes a literary geography of the city structured by the enduring claims of personal memory. I situate 'Tales of Great Tokyo Prosperity' in the broader history of the hanjōki genre, which includes 'Terakado Seiken’s Tales of Edo Prosperity' (Edo hanjōki, 1832–1836), Hattori Bushō’s 'New Tales of Tokyo Prosperity' (Tōkyō shin hanjōki 1874), and Mizushima Niou’s 'New Tales of Tokyo Prosperity' (Shin Tōkyō hanjōki, 1924). The representations of urban space in 'Tales of Great Tokyo Prosperity' disclose a vanishing city, as the physical traces of the past were effaced by the destruction of the earthquake and the rise of a modern metropolis.