Henry D. Smith

Tokyo, a spatial anthropology

Foreword, by Richard Bender Preface Introduction 1. The High City: Surface and Depths 2. The Cosmology of a City of Water 3. The Rhetoric of the Modern City 4. Modernism and Its Urban Forms Afterword Notes Index

The Origins of Student Radicalism in Japan

In the early morning hours of 18 January 1969, over eight thousand riot police were mobilized and led into the main campus of Tokyo University in an effort to dislodge several hundred diehard student radicals committed to ’fight to victory’. The police barrage of tear gas and water was met by volleys of rocks and molotov cocktails hurled by the masked and helmeted students from the rooftops of the three major buildings they had fortified. It was to be more than thirty hours before the last of the students, hands bound and heads low in defeat, were led from the Yasuda Amphitheatre, their last bastion. The battle marked a new crisis in

Synthetic arsenic sulfides in Japanese prints of the Meiji period

A multi-analytical investigation of Japanese woodblock prints ranging in date from 1864 to 1895 and covering essentially the time span between the very end of the Edo period and the middle of the Meiji period showed a widespread use of arsenic sulfides for yellow and green colored areas (the latter obtained by mixing Prussian blue to the yellow arsenic sulfides). Analysis by optical microscopy, X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, Raman microscopy, and Scanning Electron Microscopy confirmed that the yellow pigment is usually a compound belonging to the solid solution series (As8S8)–(As8S9). The poor crystallinity of the pigment as shown by Raman microscopy, the non-stoichiometric As/S ratio, as well as the presence of excess uncombined sulfur point to a synthetic origin for the pigment. Period literary sources suggest that synthetic arsenic sulfide pigments manufacture might have started in the Iwashiro province in 1846. This is to our knowledge the first conclusive evidence for the use of synthetic arsenic sulfides in woodblock prints in Japan.

World Without Walls: Kuwagata Keisai’s Panoramic Vision of Japan

The title of Donald Keene’s survey of Tokugawa literature capsulises our dominant image of the Edo period as a ‘world within walls’.1 The intent was of course to indicate Japan’s isolation from other nations, but the same phrase may be extended to encompass the pervasive image of early modern Japan as rigidly compartmentalised into a multiplicity of smaller ‘worlds’, whether the ‘four classes’ of society, the miscellaneous ‘genres’ of literature or the hereditary ‘schools’ of learning and the arts.

Singing Tales of the Gishi: Naniwabushi and the Forty-seven Rōnin in Late Meiji Japan

S O swift has been the demise of naniwabushi , the most popular form of mass entertainment in Japan throughout the first half of the twentieth century, that few Japanese under the age of fifty can even describe it, much less recall an actual performance, either live or recorded. Even by its current name of rôkyoku , a more elegant term introduced in the Taishô period but established in ordinary speech only after World War II, the story-singing tradition of naniwabushi is today largely unknown and its history poorly documented.1 It hangs on today by a thread as a performance tradition, coming to life at a handful of seasonal concerts for graying audiences and at daily performances on the first ten days of every month at the small and dilapidated Mokubatei theater in the Asakusa district of Tokyo.