Tokyo Jiei 1964/202X (Shadows of Time - Cross-Cultural Reflection on Tokyo 1964 / 202X)

The original inspiration for this book was a graduate seminar in a Culture and Representation Course offered in the 2019 Spring/Summer semester. Ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, the seminar aimed to present the changes in the Tokyo of 2019 from the Tokyo of 1964, when the first Olympics/Paralympics were held, in terms of its cultural genres such as literature, art, architecture, music, manga, photography, and theater. In other words, the seminar sought to trace the changes in the popular image of Tokyo, rather than the physical changes. When the time came to consider compiling the results of the participants' research in papers and publishing it as a collection, the Olympics/Paralympics were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Needless to say, the Tokyo in which we currently live has completely changed, and the image of Tokyo that our research had revealed can now be considered only as “pre-COVID”. Although I had no wish to participate in the Olympics-Paralympics festivities, I felt that our somewhat optimistic comparative analysis of the two eras we covered in the seminar was no longer valid; I resolved to rethink the Tokyos of 1964 and of 2020 from a perspective that could be had only during this extraordinary period of “suspended time,” when daily life was paused. The seminar continued beyond the classroom framework, with discussions going online. Given the context of their writing, each essay contains not just research results, but also the subjective feelings of the authors during the COVID-19 crisis; confusion, anger, sadness, anxiety, and depression are expressed both openly and covertly.
 
The book contains 14 essays dealing with music, comics, film, photography, architecture, literature, and theater, but the discussions often cross genres. Essays include writings on individual themes such as “walking” and “animals”; monographs on multifaceted writers such as Genpei Akasegawa; and even an experimental essay that attempts to depict Tokyo through an encounter that never actually happened between legendary dancer Tatsumi Hijikata and Michiko Kanba, a Tokyo University student who lost her life during the Anpo protests (the movement against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty).
 
The title “Tokyo Jiei” (Tokyo Time Shadow or Shadows of Time in Tokyo) refers to the traces of “suspended time” disappearing into the shadows of oblivion. Now that the pandemic is more or less over and a new way of life has taken hold in the “post-COVID” era, the tensions and confusion that suffuse the pages of this book may seem a thing of the past. Human nature becomes accustomed to the unexpected over time. We hope this book will be read as a record of the contradictions, pain, and sadness of a city that became vulnerable and briefly exposed in a state of emergency.
 

(Written by KUWADA Kohei, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2023)