Journal of History of Design and Curatorial Studies
Parsons School of Design
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

History of Design and Curatorial Studies
Parsons School of Design
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Essays 


“Sleeping Baudelaire, Sing of Kōen-Dōri”: Parco’s Spatial Dramaturgy in Shibuya

Zachary Sauer


Fig 1.1. Map of Udagawa-chō with Kōen-dōri marked in green; Spain-zaka in yellow; Parco’s main structure outlined in red (Parco Part 2 [渋谷PARCO新館] at 3-7; Seibu Department Store [西武百皆店] at 20), 1977.

“Hence it is futile to wonder, as certain Europeans do, if the spectator can ever forget the presence of the manipulators.” —Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs1

In the summer of 1973, an enchanting horse-drawn carriage accompanied by footmen in European livery appeared along Omotesandō in the Harajuku district of Shibuya. Delivering its passengers to the south side of Yoyogi Park, the carriage’s final destination was the Seibu Retailing Group’s newly-opened Parco shopping complex in Odagawa-chō. Named after the Italian word for “park” and imagined as a conduit for art, fashion, and leisure, including a top-floor theater, art gallery, and terrace cafe, Parco represented the second phase of Seibu’s daring expansion into the “dowdy backwater” of Shibuya.2 Originating as a terminal arcade within Ikebukuro Station in 1969, Seibu’s newest Parco location was a detached structure located roughly 900 meters from Shibuya Station. With the intent to establish Udagawa-chō as a fashion destination to rival the boutiques of Harajuku and Omotesandō, Seibu promoted a lively street culture around Parco that greatly influenced the urban development of Shibuya. 

Constructed along Kuyakusho-dōri at the edge of the Udagawa-chō, Parco immediately reimagined the street as Kōen-dōri, or “Park Avenue,” installing streetlights and signboards with the Italianate text “Via Parco.” Even during the recession that followed the 1973 oil shock, Kōen-dōri was promoted as a “stroller’s paradise” where “everyone you pass is beautiful.”3 Parco staged spectacular marketing interventions in and around the main thoroughfare, redirecting foot traffic away from Shibuya Station and northeast towards the top of the gently-sloping hill where Parco was situated.4 Kōen-dōri connected to a network of side streets that included Spain-zaka, or “Spain Hill,” that linked Inokashira-dōri to Penguin Street, marking the southern edge of the Parco structure. (Fig. 1.1; 1.2) These narrow, relatively undeveloped backstreets and the marketing interventions within them conflicted with the modernism of Kōen-dōri, reproducing the heterogeneous landscape of early modern Tokyo.5 

In 1977, as Parco commemorated the widening of the sidewalks of Kōen-dōri with an outdoor sculpture exhibition, art director Ishioka Eiko produced a newspaper advertisement of a couple seated before the large windows at Parco’s Pon d’Or cafe. The slogan, developed by copywriter Nagasawa Takeo, invokes the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire to “sing of Kōen-dōri”. During Ishioka’s tenure as creative director, Parco’s advertisement art earned a reputation for being “sophisticated, complicated, and difficult to understand.”6 Described by Ory Bartal as “critical visual essays,” the work of Ishioka and her contemporaries sought to reveal and contest social preconditions.7 Read as a critical text, the invocation of Baudelaire translocates the everyday of 19th-century Paris to Tokyo, writing the dialectics of the flâneuse8 into the crowd of fashionable young women gathered at Parco. 

Examining Kōen-dōri and its associated network of pedestrian zones as a kind of diorama, or “pseudo-city,”9 reveals the production of an “ambivalent space between the local and the cosmopolitan.”10 In contrast with the bustling, modernized avenue, the backstreets of Udagawa-chō embody zure, or “gaps” in a “scrap and build” development approach that sought to discard anything that was not useful to capitalism.11 Moving between avenue and backstreet, or from “front stage” to “backstage,” allowed the flâneuse to slip “behind the façade of modernity”12 to access an originary landscape. Although both spaces were deeply entangled with Parco’s marketing interventions, the juxtaposition of Kōen-dōri and Spain-zaka established two distinct, mutually-informed urbanisms that convey the “incomplete modernism”13 of Tokyo. 

Fig 1.2. Udagawa-chō with Parco’s “front stage” marked in green,“backstage” in yellow, 1977.

Writing the City

By the time of Ishioka’s 1977 advertisement, Parco commemorated the widening of the sidewalks along Kōen-dōri by staging an outdoor sculpture exhibition to “encourage the enjoyment of strolling.”14 Prior interventions included the installation of a replica Trevi Fountain in 1974 and a Statue of Liberty to commemorate the American Bicentennial in 1976. Red telephone kiosks were added in 1977, and the baroque “Angel Clock” was placed outside of the main structure in 1979.15 The interior of the complex departed from both the conventional department store and the terminal arcade. It was comprised of smaller clusters of boutiques rather than a continuous space centered around an anchor store.16 The segmented structure of the interior, as well as its theatrical framing, would parallel the space planning of the exterior. 

Described by art critic Tonō Yoshiaki as a “three-dimensional fair,”17 Parco extended in two directions; vertically, following the structure itself, which was crowned by the ninth-floor Seibu Theater; and horizontally, by way of a street scene produced through the collocation of “stages.”18 By designing a sequence of distinct zones, Parco’s spatial planning anticipated the hyperreality of Tokyo Disneyland, which was carefully composed to impede critical subjectivity. Contemporary commentators noted that the Tokyo metropolis had come to resemble, and even prefigure, the space produced at Disneyland.19 Applying the “Disneyfication” thesis in his reading of the city, sociologist Yoshimi Shunya interrogates Parco’s space planning:

Their three main strategies were: first, to give exotic names to locations in order to set them up as ‘stages.’ Accordingly, the scenery became exotic and ever-changing, as if someone had cut out photographs of foreign cities and pasted them on. Also, the new exotic names helped to cut off the outside area and transform the streets into a space with its own reality. Second, the area was made into a sequence of separate individual spaces, whereas a traditional department store would have an overview. Each boxed space has its own particular genre, connected by intricate maze-like paths. Third, this new commercial space produced a ‘segmented sensation,’ because unlike the older downtown that contained a variety of different elements, each of these spaces was structured according to its ‘theme’ and ‘taste.’20

The segmentation of space produced a theatrical “revue” of genre scenes, or what Yoshimi describes as an “accumulation of sequences.”21 Parco’s Italianicity, the monumental yet ephemeral replica of the Trevi Fountain, the Statue of Liberty, and even the Pon d’Or contributed to the foreign scenography of Kōen-dōri. Promoting the opening of Parco Part 2 with a nostalgic, art nouveau-themed image campaign, copywriter Narita Mamoru developed the slogan “I would like to call it the Parco Epoch” referencing the Belle Èpoch. Introducing the various boutiques at the new building, including the sixth-floor “doll house,” one print advertisement presents une poupée mannequin de mode (a fashion doll) “strolling” down the Champs-Élysées. 

In his account of Baudelaire, Benjamin cites Eduard Fuchs’ description of 19th-century Paris as a “colossal parade of bourgeois life which…Everything passed in [revue].”22 The Parisian physiologue, a kind of genre literature circulated through newspaper supplements, similarly “genrefied” its subjects into an accumulation of sequences.23 Tracing the precession of the physiologue to its ideal limit, Fredric Jameson acknowledges that Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire reflected the “emergence of modernism from a new experience…which transcended all the older habits of bodily perception.”24 As a means to analyze postmodernity, the site of a similar, more profound rupture, Jameson contends that Benjamin’s critique is “both singularly relevant…and singularly antiquated.”25 In the context of late-20th-century Shibuya, Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire provides the means to locate the residual, dialectical modernism that inhabits the superstructure of global capitalism.26 

Like many other Asian cities, the Tokyo metropolis is the site of “a restless, indigenous Asian peculiarity” entangled with an acculturated European modernism.27 Staged by the international mise-en-scène produced along Kōen-dōri, the “stroller’s paradise” was partially indebted to the earlier native modernism of the Genroku period (1688-1704).28 As Marika Takashini Knowles and Marie Yasunaga have recently demonstrated, the incipient urban culture of 17th- and 18th-century Japan functions to separate the flâneur, and the discourse of walking, from 19th-century Parisian modernity.29 Also emerging from the efflorescence of Genroku culture was bunraku, a form of puppet theater (ningyō jōruri) that utilizes intricate dolls accompanied by three puppeteers (ningyōtsukai) who articulate its head and arms. Situated on a platform offstage, the narrator (tayū) leads the audience through each sequence alongside musical accompaniment on the samisen. Roland Barthes describes bunraku as a polyphonic mode of production that troubles European modernism: 

Bunraku thus practices three separate writings, which it offers to be read simultaneously in three sites of the spectacle: the puppet, the manipulator, the vociferant: the effected gesture, the effective gesture, and the vocal gesture…This gesture is double: emotive gesture on the level of the doll…transitive action on the level of the manipulators. [Bunraku] separates action from gesture; it shows the gesture, lets the action be seen, exhibits simultaneously the art and the labor, reserving for each its own writing.30

By applying the discursive structure of bunraku to Parco’s spatial revue, and revealing its affinities with the everyday of Benjamin and Michel de Certeau, the space planning of Udagawa-chō facilitates “the re-emergence of the element that the urban project excluded.”31 In bunraku, the puppet, affected by visible labor, is a representation produced by the speaker; emerging from the shadows, the manipulators reveal the “secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization.”32 Positioning Parco’s dramaturgy as inheritor of bunraku allows for the “rational transparency” to locate the agency of the user in spatializing the pseudo-city.33 

 

Reading the City

From the Hachikō exit of Shibuya Station, two trajectories were available to access the three-dimensional fair at Parco. Following the path of least resistance, the user could simply follow Jingu-dōri, merging onto Kōen-dōri’s northeastward curve. The site could also be accessed from “backstage” via Spain-zaka, a narrow slope connecting Inokashira-dōri and Penguin Street. As with Parco, there were two primary means by which the pedestrian could access Inokashira-dōri; Parco’s strategic approach would direct the subject towards the left at the first scramble cross on Jingu-dōri, passing in front of the Seibu Department Store. Accessible from two additional vectors, including Shibuya Station and Dōgenzaka to the south, the subject might also traverse a more tactical route through the tangle of pedestrian streets intersecting Center-gai. This succession of increasingly complex pathways, spatialized through transitive action, allowed the flâneuse to direct the order and magnitude of the sequences.

Roughly 100 meters long, Spain-zaka curves abruptly at its northeast extremity, with a set of stairs ascending to the Parco building above. The alley was staged to transport the subject to an imagined Iberia, with its balconies and split-level façades intimating the older, narrow streets of Seville. Once a kind of red-light district,34 Parco collaborated with Uchida Hiroo, who maintained a Spanish-themed café on the slope, to name the space in 1975. Working as a community, the businesses of Spain-zaka constructed the street’s scenography themselves, and it continues to be promoted for its international atmosphere.35 By the 1980s, Banners appeared along the slope bearing the text “Spain Fiesta,” echoing the “Via Parco” signage.

Parco’s interventions “backstage,” conceived here as the narrow pedestrian streets of Spain-zaka, Penguin Street, and Sing Street (Fig. 1.2), had a distinct character from the spectacular production of Kōen-dōri. Often the site of bazaars, such as the National Flea Market, exhibiting goods from across the archipelago and the Tō-ji Temple Market, a famous Buddhist ennichi,36 or street festival, brought to Shibuya from the historic capital of Kyoto, this “sequence” produced the dialectical urban collage of old and new.37 This discontinuity was especially pronounced during the National Flea Market when vernacular signage was installed at the intersection of Kōen-dōri and Penguin Street, directly beneath the Parisian marquee advertising Parco’s restaurant and theater. The bricolage of Spain-zaka similarly departed from the modern strategies of spatial planning employed along Kōen-dōri. Emerging in and around remnants of the early modern city, these interstitial spaces reveal the deviations in Parco’s scenography.

Looming above Spain-zaka, the Parco structure became the focal point of the hill, resembling the monumentality of Disneyland’s Cinderella Castle. Similarly conceived as a dioramic castle town, Spain-zaka reproduces the spatial peculiarities of early modern Edo described by architect Muraji Takeo:

Edo was a castle town, and its topography readily determined the natural divisions of living areas for the social class: the military or samurai, the merchants, and the farmers. The military class made their homes on the western side of Edo, an area full of hilly sites extending from the mountains, while the merchants and business owners found the lower reaches of the delta forming eastern Edo to be most suitable for their lifestyles. Thoroughfares developed along natural boundaries with roads following either the ridges or valleys…The necessity to connect the high roads with those in the valleys resulted in the physical features of steep slopes and inclines in certain areas.38  

Through an extensive survey of the Tokyo metropolis, urban historian Jinnai Hidenobu argues that the spatiality of Edo is recognizable within the urban fabric of the modern city, a phenomenon he describes as the “anthropological structuring of space.”39 Kōen-dōri, with its gentle slope directing food traffic towards Yoyogi Park, functions as a ridge road, while Spain-zaka connects the valley and ridge. The practicality of bridging valley and ridge necessitated these vernacular links and would have been constructed by the townspeople themselves.40 As was often the case within the Yamanote Loop, the valley roads became the site of a bustling commercial district centered around Dōgenzaka, originally situated on the southern bank of a canal. The city’s relationship to water finds a discursive structure in the name Udagawa-chō, literally “the city on the Uda river,” which parallels the enduring spatial structure of the district.41 Similarly, Inokashira-dōri, or “the street at the water’s source,” can be accessed through the tactical landscape of Center-gai, where foot traffic follows the original flow of the river. From Inokashira-dōri, Spain-zaka charts a course uphill, from the canals of the valley to the south-facing greenways of the ridge, where samurai and daimyō built their estates. Moving perpendicularly along the ridge reproduces the early modern syntax of ridge, valley, and slope. 

Following Henri Lefebvre, the juxtaposition of Parco’s “front stage” and “backstage” produced a “new social reality…based…on their (dialectical) relationship in space, a space which had its own basis in their history.”42 Reading the city as history reverses the “manifest expulsion of time” urbane to modernism, revealing the originary landscape of early modern Edo.43 This “three-dimensional” reading of space carves a gap through which historical depth and specificity can be applied, as Jinnai demonstrates by overlaying Meiji-era maps over the modern city.44 As in Barthes’ reading of bunraku, the “gesture” of urban development, or the representation of space constructed by Parco’s dramaturgy, is separated from the “act” of articulating the originary landscape, spoken through the performance of the user. Following the various trajectories of the city allowed the subject to act out the spatial peculiarities of Edo, just as Jinnai does in his wanderings of Yamanote. This demonstrative engagement formed the basis of Street Observation Studies, a group of artists and scholars who roamed the city in search of an originary landscape beneath the modern metropolis.45

 

Speaking the City

Opening a newspaper in Tokyo in 1977 might reveal Ishioka’s invocation of Baudelaire, just as the Parisian flâneur would have been confronted with the latest physiologue. Seibu’s visionary president, the former student radical Tsutumi Seiji, contends that advertising is “a pattern of coming back again and again to community ideas.”46 The ever-present threat of capitalist “translation” aside, contemporary commentators saw “Parco culture” as the next phase of the student movement, providing a means to slip into the crowd and away from the state apparatus. Building on his theory of the pseudo-city, Tanō describes “Parco culture” as somewhere between the “managed society” of the state and the everyday:

It is easy to criticize the freedom of the chaotic, elusive, and lively youth walking down [Kōen-dōri] as controlled freedom. But where “management” fails to reach, there is something teasing, earnest, and vague, something of an ineffable but shaky substance, of the born, of the living. If the situation were left uncontrolled, such spontaneity would be impossible.47

The flâneur inhabited a similar subjectivity, with the arcades of Fourier providing the rational transparency to contest the Second Empire through the transitive performance of the everyday. Partly withdrawn from Parisian society as a means to critique it, Baudelaire was nevertheless intoxicated by the commodity soul that permeated the crowd. The same may be said of the generation associated with “Parco culture,” as the youth searched for something beyond consumer society but were ultimately captivated by it.48 Yoshimi defines this “beyond” as a figment of hyperreality, indicative of the precession of the “fictional” as the antithesis of the real.49 Therefore, Jinnai’s historical imagination could be read as its own “stage” in a Disneyland that has come to reproduce itself endlessly. Even so, Jordan Sand resists a “capitalism swallows all” thesis, revealing that “the cat-and-mouse game between capitalists and critics was actually more complex, as it revolved around a third player who, though lacking the sophisticated tricks of the other two, destabilized the game by constantly shifting its boundaries.”50

Closely associated with Buddhism and the theatrical forms of bunraku and noh, the lyric tradition in Japan demands performance, either during ritual or as part of the jōruri narrative practice from which bunraku derives. Ishioka’s advertisement calls Baudelaire to “sing,” not as a lyric poet but as a vociferant in de Certeau’s larger ensemble, which revolves around the user:

Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks.” All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken, and the walker. These enunciatory operations are of an unlimited diversity.51

In bunraku, the puppeteers are driven by the script of the performance, but they alone possess the agency to articulate the gestures of the doll. As the youth wandered Shibuya and beyond, the sentences they spoke prefigured the ascendency of Jinnai’s historical methodology, which culminated in the establishment of the Edo-Tokyo Museum in 1993. Rejecting the “scrap and built” approach to urban development, activists successfully agitated for an amendment to the Town Planning Law in 1992, which allowed for the systemization of user participation in urban planning.52 The deviations within Parco’s spatial dramaturgy revealed its virtuality, allowing for the separation of gesture from action. This subjectivization, partly facilitated by the criticality of Parco’s marketers, allowed the urban subject to inhabit the dialectic of the national and the everyday. In the song of Kōen-dōri, it is the puppeteers who spatialize the city, weaving together innumerable writings to speak the city’s form.




Zachary Sauer is a student in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies MA program offered jointly by Parsons School of Design and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. He is a fellowship recipient in the museum’s Cross-Platform Publishing Department, where he has contributed to the museum’s various digital publishing platforms. Taking an expansive approach to visual and cultural studies, his current research interests include media history and theory, digital art and culture, psychoanalysis, and affect theory.


NOTES

  1. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 62. 
  2. For an account of Seibu’s “siege of Shibuya,” see Thomas R. H. Havens, Architects of Affluence: The Tsutsumi Family and the Seibu-Saison Enterprises in Twentieth-Century Japan, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 98-107.
  3. Paruko no ado wāku: 1969-1979 (Tokyo: Parco Shuppan, 1979), 46-7; Havens, 105.
  4. Havens, 105.
  5. Muraji Takeo, “Tokyo: An Urban College of Chaos amidst Order,” in Asian Alterity: With Special Reference to Architecture and Urbanism Through the Lens of Cultural Studies, ed. William Siew Wai Lim and Shuhuan Lin (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2007), 89-91. https://doi.org/10.1142/6486. See Jinnai Hidenobu, “The locus of my study on Tokyo: From building typology to spatial anthropology and eco-history,” Japan Architectural Review 3, no. 3 (July 2020), 271-283. https://doi.org/10.1002/2475-8876.12167
  6. Ory Bartal, Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club (Hannover, New England: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 1-5. By 1980, Parco’s distinct marketing approach originated the colloquialism Parco-teki, or “Parco-like,” which was used to describe anything “sophisticated, complicated, and difficult to understand.” 
  7. Ory Bartal, Critical Design in Japan: Material Culture, Luxury, and the Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 46-7. For a discussion of Ishioka’s criticality, see pp. 54-85.
  8. With provocative slogans such as “A model is more than just a pretty face,” and “Girls be ambitious!” Ishioka’s advertisement art was characteristic of Parco’s so-called “Age of the Woman” marketing strategy. As such, Walter Benjamin’s flâneur has been reimagined here as the flâneuse
  9. Tonō Yoshiaki, “Paruko no bunkarashisaron: Shibuya o kaeta rittai ennichi [Theory of Parco’s Cultural Identity: The Three-Dimensional Fair that Changed Shibuya],” in Paruko no ado wāku, 8-11. Tonō’s term kashō toshi, or “pseudo-city,” refers to the virtuality of “Parco culture,” which “floats untethered to the ground,” alluding to the “floating world” of urban pleasure districts during the Edo period. He contrasts this with the “sit-in” culture of the 1960s student movement, which employed the tactic of planting oneself firmly to the ground. 
  10. Rolf J. Goebel, “Benjamin’s Flâneur in Japan: Urban Modernity and Conceptual Relocation,” The German Quarterly 71, no. 4 (Autumn 1998), 378, https://doi.org/10.2307/407733. In Goebel’s account of Benjamin, this dialectical space is the habitat of the flâneur.
  11. Jordan Sand, “The Ambivalence of the New Breed: Nostalgic Consumerism in 1980s and 1990s Japan,” in The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West, ed. Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 89-90.
  12. Sand, 108.
  13. Goebel, 377. See Muraji, 91.
  14. Paruko no ado wāku, 107.
  15. Paruko no ado wāku, 49.
  16. Havens, 104.
  17. Tonō, 8-10.
  18. Yoshimi Shunya, “Consuming ‘America’: from Symbol to System,” in Consumption in Asia: Lifestyle and Identities (London: Taylor & Francis, 2000), 202-224. http://doi.org/10.4324/9780203467565-13. For more on the notion of  “spatial dramaturgy” as it relates to Shibuya, see Yoshimi, Toshi no doramaturugī: Tōkyō sakariba no shakai shi [Urban Dramaturgy: A Social History of Tokyo’s Crowded Places] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2008), 295-318. 
  19. Sand, 88-9.
  20. Yoshimi, 216. 
  21. Yoshimi, 216.
  22. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism, trans. Henry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), 36. Zohn translates die Revue to the English “review,” which does not sufficiently convey the nuance of the text. As such, the citation has been modified to conform more closely to the original German. See Eduard Fuchs, Die Karikatur der europäischen Völker (Berlin: A. Hofmann & Company, 1901), 362.
  23. Benjamin, 361-2.
  24. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern: 1983-1993 (London: Verso, 1998), 16.
  25. Ibid.
  26. Reestablishing the Marxian dialectic in his critique of postmodernism, Jameson contends that “features […] in an earlier period or system [that] were subordinate now become dominant, and features that had been dominant again became secondary,” Jameson, 18. 
  27. William Siew Wai Lim and Shujuan Lin, Asian Alterity: With Special Reference to Architecture and Urbanism Through the Lens Of Cultural Studies (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2007), 36. https://doi.org/10.1142/6486
  28. Havens, 105. As a fashion bīru, or “fashion building,” Parco created an environment where the flâneuse delighted in “seeing and being seen.” This sensibility was central to Genroku gala culture, where it was customary for the emergent bourgeoisie to express their wealth through lavishly embellished kimono.  
  29. Yasmin Siabi, “Decentering the Flâneur: Global Histories of Walking the Early Modern City, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, United Kingdom, November 15-16, 2019,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 11, no. 1 (2022), 219. https://doi.org/10.1386/
  1. Barthes, 49-54.
  2. Michel de Certeau, “Walking the City,” in Design Studies: A Reader, ed. by Hazel Clark and David Brody (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 249. Barthes’ polyphonic reading of bunraku mirrors de Certeau’s discourse of walking: “The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of space.” From de Certeau, 249.
  3. Michel de Certeau, introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xi-xxiv.
  4. de Certeau, “Walking the City,” 249. Crucially, rational transparency is achieved by identifying the articulation points of “the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity.”
  5. During the Genroku period, the ukiyo, or “floating world,” emerged at the intersection of the brothel district and the theater. Located at the corner of Spain-zaka and Penguin Street [Fig. 2.1], The Oriental Hotel operated until at least 1977. Tracing the history of love hotels in Tokyo, Mitsuhashi Junko and Inoue Shōichi have demonstrated their role in the production of space in Tokyo. See Mitsuhashi and Inoue, Seiyoku no kenkyū: Tōkyō no ero chiri hen [A Study of Sexual Desire: Tokyo’s Erotic Geography] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2015).
  6. “Dōri no namae [Street Names],” Shibuya kuyakusho [Shibuya City Office], accessed May 17, 2022, https://www.city.shibuya.tokyo.jp/bunka/spot/meisho/street.html.
  7. Tonō’s term “three-dimensional fair,” or rittai-ennichi, uses ennichi rather than the more neutral, roughly synonymous terms. Written as 縁日, ennichi combines the characters for “relation” and “day” (lit. “Related day”) to describe an auspicious day associated with a particular Shintō or Buddhist deity. Visiting a shrine or temple on this day would incur the deity’s favor, and thus local festivals emerged in and around these sites.
  8. Muraji, 91.
  9. Muraji, 89.
  10. Jinnai, 273-75.
  11. Jinnai, 256, fig. 6.
  12. Jinnai has also demonstrated the spatialization of Tokyo through the relationship with water, see Jinnai, 275-8.
  13. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 78.
  14. Lefebvre, 96.
  15. Jinnai, 272. 
  16. Sand, 92-4.
  17. Tsutsumi Seiji, Japan’s Consumer Society: A Critical Introduction, trans. Frederick M. Uleman (Tokyo: ARC Publishing, 1999), 55.
  18. Tonō, 10.
  19. Sand, 108.
  20. Yoshimi, 220-21.
  21. Sand, 108.
  22. de Certeau, “Walking the City,” 251.
  23. Muraji, 95.