Popular representations of Tokyo’s history: anxiety of discontinuity and yearning for continuity
| Dates: | 18 April 2012 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 19:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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Speaker: Dr Shiro Yoshioka, Newcastle University
Further details: “This is really a strange city. … As each building fell, a new one rose up. Look away for a second and everything is changed. Before you know it, the past is gone, No one in Tokyo seems to care about our vanishing history”.
In anime feature Patlabor: the Movie (1989), one of the characters lamented about the extraordinary speed of change in the landscape of Tokyo in the middle of so-called “Bubble economy”. Such magnitude and speed of change, however, was not limited to that particular period. Instead, it has been part and parcel of modern history of the Japanese capital. Highs and lows in the history of the city---earthquake, war, Olympic game, and economic craze---put the city in a ceaseless cycle of destruction and reconstruction. People, as seen in the quote above, do not pay much attention to the change. However, some of Japanese popular texts show anxiety such change can arouse through depiction of “Twilight Zone” in Tokyo where past is somehow trapped in the middle of the present without being replaced by things new. In this talk, I will show some examples of such depiction, contextualising these fantastic images into “real” history of Tokyo.
ALL WELCOME! FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT MARA.PATESSIO@MANCHESTER.AC.UK
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