Sanctuaries of the City

Lessons from Tokyo

Anni Greve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317059554
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book proposes that we can learn from Tokyo about the instrinsic importance of in-between realms to an international culture: the sanctuaries. It argues that certain urban societies are more robust than others because they offer socio-spatial capacities that enable the development of skills for coping with modern forms of living. It studies places that may open the way to an international culture, namely market places, venues for performing arts and religious sites, which - with particular reference to the Durkheimian tradition - are considered here in their quality as sanctuaries. From its empirical analysis of such sanctuaries in Tokyo, this book develops a more general theory about mega-cities, urban sociability and identity.

Chapter 1
Sanctuaries of the City, Lessons from Tokyo

The East Asian World City of Tokyo offers a unique intellectual laboratory for the study of cosmopolitan virtues as emergent realities. Whereas the European modern metropolis of the late nineteenth century was an intellectual laboratory for classical social thought, Tokyo today offers an opportunity to study the new conditions that can be realised in living daily the core cosmopolitan value of ‘hospitality’ to the stranger.

Tokyo shares aspects with other large cities in its size, urban density and competition over space, as well as its many strangers, yet new phenomena have emerged. Alongside London and New York, Tokyo belongs to the leading World Cities in economic globalisation. These three World Cities are in intense communication with each other perhaps more than with their respective local regions. They are functionally alike; they operate as keynotes in the global economy, are among the key hubs of the world’s 24-hour stock market and have key command and control functions in the operation of the world economy. Place matters to the global economy, and Tokyo is one of these. This city, among the largest in the world, with more than 35 million inhabitants, is a command centre for the global economy. In this quality, it offers a unique intellectual laboratory for studying components that are transversal (Sassen 1991, 1997; Soja 2000; Taylor 2004).

Tokyo, in company with Copenhagen and Munich, also belongs to the top three most ‘liveable’ cities in the world (Monocle 2008). Tokyo is considerably larger, with a higher density and level of complexity than these, yet it is also ‘liveable’. It is a place one likes to be, affluent, clean, safe and soft, it has an order of its own, yet at the same time is creative and dynamic. Its citizens live well, perhaps spending lunchtime in a public bath or a golf training lab, while after hours they may go to a restaurant, have a couple of drinks, listen to some jazz and later take the subway home – or simply walk. Even late at night the subways and streets of Tokyo are remarkably safe. With the risk of valorising certain forms of sociability, it has an extraordinary dynamism, which is urban in the fullest sense of the term. How is this possible?

The dominant tendency in English-language texts on modern Tokyo is to emphasise the pertinence of pre-industrial, Gemeinshaft-like bonds of commitment alongside modern forms of living. Hechter and Kanazawa write (1993, 485-6): ‘the lives of the Japanese are under almost constant supervision by other members of their groups, making individuals visible and therefore accountable for their behaviour’. Tokyo citizens live with an almost schizoid split personality, meeting the demands of the modern world with codes of civility, but behind the mask remaining traditional. They are group-oriented and stick to the rules and rituals of traditional society, seasonal ceremonies, gift-giving, the kimono, the Haiku-style poem, tea ceremonies.

This argument, however, neglects the fact that this mega city is based on a large urban society with roots going as far back as the seventeenth century. For example, by 1720 Edo-Tokyo was one of the largest cities in the world, with 1.3 million inhabitants (Cybriwsky 1998, 60). Large cities are different, ‘by nature great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers’ (Jacobs 1961). The uprooted individual does not relate exclusively to close-knit communitarian-like units consisting of strong personal ties, but seeks out new sites marked by a social etiquette for meeting strangers with confidence and trust. A thorough investigation of this topic is the aim of this book.

The Book

This is a book about sanctuaries for cosmopolitan virtues as emergent realities. It is my overall hypothesis that certain urban societies are more robust than others because they offer sanctuaries for acquiring a social etiquette for meeting strangers with hospitality. It studies places that may open the way to a cosmopolitan culture, but they are considered here in their quality as sanctuaries. One leading idea is that these sanctuaries offer a playground for coming to terms with modernity and for teaching people how to make a life with those who are not like themselves. For the modern city they are the tightly woven fabric of social reality, and their configuration can make certain cities more liveable than others.

The book shares renewed attention to the in-between realm where people meet on equal terms with a growing community of thinkers who study place from this angle. In sociology this is not part of the classical conceptual framework of national sociologies, most prominently the Chicago School, for which place was linked to community through local culture. In recent years the assumption about the advantages of close-knit small communities has been subject to critique. With inspiration from Mark Grannovetter (Grannovetter 1973) it is argued that personalised relationships improve networks of strong ties within a community, but without offering a normative imperative to trust others outside the local network. Social networks consisting of strong ties might very well contribute to the ongoing segregation of society since they generate boundaries and create the labels ‘we’, ‘you’ and ‘they’ ((Beaumont et al. 2003; Vranken 2004; Morlicchio 2005; Greve 2008). In this book, place is studied from a different angle, not linked to the local community, and not studied with the aim of identifying inward-looking communitarian bonds of commitment. Instead, it studies places that promote the opposite, a way out of localism. We have to distinguish between the internal structure of identity and ‘the relations that run outwards, the wider geographies through which identities are constituted; the stranger that remains without the gates’ (Massey 2007, 178).

Novel Forms of Urbanism

Tokyo is a case in point when it comes to studying cosmopolitanism as socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself. It is ‘an approach that shifts the emphasis to internal developmental processes within the social world rather than seeing globalization as the primary mechanism’ (Gelanty 2007, 25). And it is an approach that sees modernity as ‘historically a global and conjunctural phenomenon, not a virus that spread from one place to another’ (Subramanyan 1998, 99-100). This has at least two implications: First, there is a shift away from a common assumption about cities throughout the world that they are essentially an elaboration of the Euro-American model. Recent studies of World Cities (Massey 2007) have pointed out that the global nature of certain city-regions is not only due to processes form outside. The city-region is diverse, and the reason for its economic health over recent decades is ‘not by any means its global nature’. This goes for European as much as for East Asian World Cities. In Postcolonial Urbanism, Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes, Bishop et al. (2003) demonstrate the narrowness of this idea. Cities in the postcolonial world are producing novel forms of urbanism that are not reducible to Western urbanism. With good reason, the discourse on the postcolonial city does not include Tokyo. However, this has had the unintended consequence that the urbanism of Tokyo is aligned with New York more often than, for instance, Singapore or Shanghai.

Secondly, there has been a shift away from the nation state as the ultimate turning point for analysis. Although the global nature of certain East Asian World Cities is not only due to processes from the outside, this does not mean that the nation state is the ultimate turning point for their activities. Bishop et al. argue (2003, 22) that, from serving the material, bureaucratic, technical, ideological and imaginative needs of remote empires, East Asian postcolonial cities turned explicitly modern in a matter of years, ‘with the concept of the national playing an important, but oddly peripheral, role in city development, self-imaging, and structuring’. Tokyo does not struggle with colonial legacies in quite the same way as the postcolonial mega cities of the region. Yet there are similarities too.

In Tokyo the nation state is not the ultimate turning point for its activities. Tokyo is the capital of a nation which is relatively homogenous, with an almost unbreakable language code, struggling with its far from proud nationalist heritage, yet in intense communication with other vibrant modern urban societies in the world. The nation state has been weakened, externally by its status as a protectorate of the United States in a military sense instigated by the 1960 treaty (Smith 1998),1 and internally by coherent independent intermediary bodies, ‘the direction of the Japanese political process from village politics to the national level is decided by the ambiguous outworking of reciprocal negotiations of middle range organizations’ (Ikegami 1999).2 It is Robert Pekkanen’s central point (2006, 8-10) that we are dealing with a dual civil society. Japan’s civil society can be characterised as ‘members without advocates’,

This phrase turns Theda Skocpol’s characterization of American civil society on its head to emphasize the participatory contribution but lack of policy influence of Japan’s civil society configuration.

In paraphrasing Bishop et al., Tokyo went from a metropolis serving the material, bureaucratic, technical, ideological and imaginative needs of a conservative nation state to an explicitly modern, international World City in a matter of years, ‘with the concept of the national playing an important, but oddly peripheral, role in city development, self-imaging, and structuring’.

The Cosmopolitan Agenda is of the City

The critical intellectual edge of this book comes from challenging and undermining the priority which conventional social science accords to nation states as actors and arenas. Some researchers are extremely pessimistic about the continued reproduction of contemporary society, anticipating an epoch of uncertainty, disorder and conflict (Wallerstein 1999). Urban researchers speak about the threats and dangers of new forms of segregation, inner-city renovation, gentrification and the rise of urban glamour zones and urban war zones (Sassen 1996; Body Gendrot 2000; Donzelot 2003, 2006, 2009a, 2009b, Greve et al. 2008). These observers focus on the negative features that are judged responsible for inadequate social cohesion rather than on the totality of processes that establish and reproduce bonds in our societies. These features thus become symptoms or ‘alert’ or ‘alarm’ indicators of the state of health of society. Despite this rather bleak picture, others take time to reformulate what has been coined the cosmopolitan agenda. This book starts here, cosmopolitanism is an argument for the recognition of the essential humanity we all share – not so much despite our differences but by virtue of our differences. Tokyo shares negative features with other mega-regions,3 yet I believe we can learn from Tokyo how to handle these, since it possesses unique socio-spatial infrastructures for coming to terms with modernity. I shall show that these infrastructures have sanctuary qualities.

William Smith (Smith 2007) has explored the virtues associated with cosmopolitan citizenship and draws on the work of Hannah Arendt to develop the idea of ‘worldliness’ as the cosmopolitan disposition par excellence. Arendt’s idea of ‘worldliness’ raises the question of being that is centrally oriented to the concept of place as such. She locates freedom squarely in the public sphere, where, exempted from the necessity of domestic labour, men meet as equals to debate and decide matters of public concern. Looking back to the pre-Socratic Greek polis (city-state), she found a model for what public life should be, the agora provided an in-between realm where people met on equal terms, regardless of rank and status order. It is a realm in between the home and work, as Henaff and Strong suggest (2001, 5), ‘it is theatrical, associated with sight’.

Arendt’s idea points towards what has been termed the city-as-theatre tradition. In ‘The Civitas of Seeing’ Richard Sennett (1989) writes,

A city isn’t just a place to live, to shop, to go out and have kids play. It’s a place that implicates how one derives one’s ethics, how one develops a sense of justice, how one learns to talk with and learn from people who are unlike oneself, which is how a human being becomes human.

This tradition conceives the city as the arena for human drama and takes a symbolic approach to studying the internal structure of a city. ‘The topics, actors and struggles of the human drama have common sources and similarities that cut across civilisations and societies, but the development of the human drama is influenced to a large extent by the particular urban setting’ (Eisenstadt and Shachar 1987, 36). Its universal dimension ‘that cuts across civilisations and societies’ has to do with the quality of the site it opens for ‘the idea of being a world citizen rather than a citizen of this or that nation’. As I see it, it calls for broadening the research agenda by addressing a new set of questions concerning the quality of the site. This book’s concern is its sanctuary qualities.

The particular urban dimension involves history, it has to do with the site in its relationship to other sites in the city, and how the relationship between these sites changes over time. I follow John A. Marino (2002) in his contention that, ‘as the postmodernist crisis in social thought and the linguistic turn in historical studies have increasingly called into question social scientific epistemologies, the relationship between history and the social sciences has strengthened. While still focusing on the problem of social change, such historically focused and self-reflective tendencies have shifted research in both history and the social sciences to include both spatial and temporal as well as comparative dimensions’. This is where the shortage of the public approach comes in generally the public sphere is unrelated to other sites of the city. Referring to ancient Greece, Marcel Hénaff and Tracy B. Strong (2001, 4-5) differentiate four kinds of urban spaces, private, sacred, common and public,

The space is private when a given individual or set of individuals are recognized by others as having the right to establish criteria that must be met for anyone else to enter.… it The sacred space is the space of the Gods, not under human rules but religious, sacred ones.… Common space admits of no criteria; it is open to all in the same way. It is not owned or controlled.… [A]ll can go there to extract from it what is there. Thus the sea, pastures, forests are (can be) common space. That is not a space to which one goes to speak with others. [Public space is open; it is] a human construct, an artefact, the result of the attempt by human beings to shape the place and thus the nature of their interaction. [It is also] theatrical, in that it is a place which is seen and shows oneself to others.

In the Early Modern Period, the public sphere did not provide an open space where people would meet on equal terms, regardless of rank and status order. Here the theory of absolutism was embodied in an extraordinary development of the ‘theatre of monarchy’, the public representation of royal power and royal glory (Lillehoj 2004). But the period witnessed the emergence of large urban societies, ‘many of the earliest experiments in modern urbanism were made in South East Asia’ (Bishop et al. 2003, 21). This era is also termed ‘the utopian early phase of modernism’ because it saw the emergence of a private sphere where people were able to meet on equal terms. The private space provided a common ground for transactions between persons from different backgrounds with different interests. People behaved differently, they met as equals and performed in accordance with a social etiquette for people who are equal, as if in a theatre.

In the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers Adam Smith and David Hume expected different kind of civilizing results from the private sphere, in particular the market place, ranging from the polishing of manners to limitations on political power by a properly administrated legal order (Hirschman 1977; Kangas 2006, 203-19). In the nineteenth century too, Karl Marx, ‘who defined a society from its power of abstraction’ (Toscano 2008), had an eye for the civilising aspects of market place relations. They have a capacity for ‘real abstraction’, an ability to abstract from ‘complex material and ideological differences’.

Today new forms of spatial configurations are taking place in the modern large city. For Arendt (1958, 33) the most fundamental change is what she calls “the rise of the social”. This development is primarily responsible for the fact that in modernity the private and public are no longer distinct, that politics has become merely a function of society and that the household has exploded the limits which formerly constrained it. For Henaff and Strong (2001; 24) ‘there is no longer a single and privileged stage specific to the political realm’, for new media have transformed the way in which politicians appear in public, and ‘political public space dissolves into over exposure of the social’. Against this background, East Asian Tokyo is a case in point, where we see the surprising persistence of earlier stages. Unfortunately, so far too little attention has been paid to this important theme.

The Content of the Book

The present book focuses on two distinctive periods in modern urbanism, the utopian early phase of modernism, and our present period of late modernism, marked by the rebuilding of cities as strategic sites in globalisation processes and the reinvention of ideas of cosmopolitan virtues. It is a leading idea that one of the sources of Tokyo’s success as a ‘liveable’ city is a heritage of the utopian early phase of modernism, namely sanctuaries of urban sociability. Today urbanism is in its fastest and most dynamic phase in history. Old cities are being reconfigured, and global cities will be functionally different, thus less and less calculated objects. What remains of earlier stages? In East Asia the utopian early modern city, in which the theatre was a key order of representation, became marginalised with the colonial city (Phillips 2007). In this respect Tokyo is a special case, being completely closed during the decisive periods of the colonial wars. Therefore we are witnessing the surprising persistence of earlier phases.

The book suggests a place-historical perspective, an analytical strategy that opens the way for an investigation of the sanctuary as part of a specific pattern, thus hopefully avoiding the dangers of over-generalization inherent in any all-embracing paradigm of public life. With inspiration from Marcel Hénaff and Tracy B. Strong (2001), it singles out four spaces of urban sociability from the criteria to be met for someone to enter the space, the public place, the private place, the sacred place and the common place. My focus is places, which stand in a complex relationship to the public realm of power, namely the market place, places for the performing arts and the sacred sanctuaries. They are studied in their quality as urban sanctuaries.

The book goes back to the Tokugawa era (1603-1867) to provide a place-historical study of Edo. It argues that the rise of a large urban society became a ‘Pandora’s Box’ in Japanese society, using this metaphor for the unanticipated and irreversible consequences of horizontal networks of weak ties for the formation of ‘sociation’ (Simmel) or ‘expressive solidarity’ (Durkheim). Paul Virilio’s idea of a stereoscope can be advantageously used to describe the situation (in Bishop et al. 2003, 22),

The human being is increasingly caught between two...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prelude: Positioning
• 1 Sanctuaries of the City, Lessons from Tokyo
• PART I URBAN SANCTUARY-RESEARCH
• PART II A PLACE-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
• PART III LESSONS FROM TOKYO
• Postlude
• References
• Index