Tag: Urban Studies

Higashi Tokyo Machi Machi

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Keita Katsushika’s manga Higashi Tōkyō Machi Machi (東東京区区) is a leisurely walking tour of East Tokyo. As suggested by their pen name, the artist lives in Tokyo’s Katsushika Ward, which is known for the retro ambiance of its Shibamata district and its green and pleasant riverside walking paths. Keita Katsushika is keen to show the reader the quiet charm of the area while exploring the depth of its history and the diversity of its communities.

Higashi Tōkyō Machi Machi follows the adventures of three focal characters. 21yo Sarah is a college student majoring in Urban Studies, and 8yo Selam is the daughter of an Ethiopian immigrant who runs a small restaurant near her university. While Sarah and Selam are out on a walk one afternoon, they meet 13yo Haruta, a homeschooled student pursuing his interest in Tokyo’s history. The friendship between these three characters is sweet and uncomplicated, and their personalities facilitate different approaches to urban exploration.

The trio’s first walk together takes them to the Tokyo Skytree, where they’re able to look out over the neighborhood while studying a reproduction of an Edo-period artwork that depicts the region as it appeared in the past. Another adventure takes them to the former site of the Venice Market, a postwar black market that was created by laying boards over a drainage canal. Since then, a normal street was built over the water, and the area hosts a number of stores and restaurants catering to Tokyo’s immigrant populations. If you’re interested in the history of the Venice Market, you can check out a two-page preview of this section of the manga (here).

All three characters were born and raised in Japan, and no one ever treats them with anything less than kindness and respect. As Sarah writes in the opening to her senior thesis, the formerly depopulated areas of Northeast Tokyo have gradually become home to many immigrant communities, who have revitalized the neighborhoods where they settle. Instead of resenting the growth of their communities, many older residents are happy to share their knowledge and memories with curious young people.

For what it’s worth, this portrayal of gregarious retirees is true to my own experiences walking around Tokyo with friends. Whether you’re a visitor or a long-term resident, it doesn’t matter what your face looks like or how you dress. As long as you’re willing to listen, there will always be people willing to share their stories. The manga’s scenes of immigrant community gatherings are equally warm and friendly. It’s lovely to see the diversity of people and life experiences in Tokyo shown as what it really is – not as a social issue to be discussed when something bad happens, but rather as a normal and pleasant aspect of everyday life. 

In many ways, Higashi Tōkyō Machi Machi reminds me of Kiyohiko Azuma’s manga Yotsuba&!, which follows the wholesome everyday adventures of a translator, his friends, and the young girl he adopted abroad. Just as in Yotsuba&!, the art of Higashi Tōkyō Machi Machi places simple and stylized characters into meticulously detailed backgrounds, thus helping the reader feel immersed in the cityscape of Tokyo and its suburbs.

The main difference is that Keita Katsushika’s manga is dense with text and reads more like a collection of illustrated essays than a story. Thankfully, the writing follows the standard shōnen manga convention of glossing the kanji with their hiragana pronunciations. As you might imagine, this is especially helpful with place names.

I’d recommend Higashi Tōkyō Machi Machi to anyone who’s interested in the history and culture of Tokyo. If you’ve read Jorge Almazán’s study Emergent Tokyo and are curious about how the urban design principles Almazán charted in West Tokyo neighborhoods have been adapted to the older neighborhoods in the east of the city, this manga was published for you specifically. Higashi Tōkyō Machi Machi is a treasure, and it’s a joy to explore Tokyo alongside its characters.

Kanda Gokurachō Shokunin Banashi

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The first volume of Akihito Sakaue’s manga Kanda Gokurachō Shokunin Banashi, which won the Tezuka Osamu New Creator Prize in 2024, collects five stand-alone short stories about the everyday lives of artisans during the Edo Period. As might be expected from a manga about craftsmanship, Sakaue devotes meticulous care and attention to creating an accurate visual depiction of the tools and techniques used in these traditional arts. 

Shokunin Banashi opens with a twelve-page account of a day in the life of a carpenter who creates and repairs wooden buckets. Although the work may seem unglamorous, the skill involved is readily apparent. An additional layer of accuracy lies in the fact that this story’s star craftsperson is female, as were many of the artisans who kept Edo period society functioning.

The next two stories feature a blacksmith who specializes in swords and an indigo dyer who dreams of creating her own fabric pattern designs. My favorite of these opening stories is the fourth, which follows a young but talented seamster who sews and binds the edges of tatami mats. Along with the rest of his team, he’s been hired to replace the tatami in a high-end establishment in the Yoshiwara red light district. The courtesans are impressed by the craftsman’s skill with his hands, but he remains focused on his craft and maintains an appropriate professional distance. Once he’s finished the job, however, he allows himself to be a little flattered. This is a cute story that’s also very sympathetic to the craft of the women who work in Yoshiwara.

The three-chapter story in the second half of the volume is a workplace drama about a company of contractors who specialize in laying plaster walls. This is intense physical labor that requires a good eye, a steady hand, and careful group coordination. The leader of the team, Chōshichi, is an undisputed master of her craft, but a new recruit, Jinsaburō, soon learns that there’s trouble among the ranks of her subordinates. A master craftsman himself, Jinsaburō supports Chōshichi during the construction of a townhouse. For the reader, this is a marvelous opportunity to get an inside look at each stage of how these houses were built.

I’d recommend Shokunin Banashi to anyone who enjoyed Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ōoku series, especially for the high quality of its historical representation and the subtlety of its human drama. I might also recommend Shokunin Banashi to any illustrator who’s interested in studying hands depicted in a variety of positions while manipulating all sorts of specific tools. The art in Shokunin Banashi is something special, as is the physical book itself, which was designed to be a beautiful object.

Edited to add: This manga has been licensed by Yen Press as Neighborhood Craftsmen: Stories from Kanda’s Gokura-chou. Excellent!

Emergent Tokyo

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Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City is a fascinating study of urban space augmented by a wealth of photographs and illustrations. Jorge Almazán convincingly argues that, instead of being designed from the top down, Tokyo’s distinctive cityscape emerged from history and opportunity.

Almazán focuses on five distinguishing characteristics of Tokyo, from the famous zakkyo “mixed-use” highrise buildings that line the main boulevards to the dense shopping areas that crowd the bays between support columns under elevated train tracks. Each feature of Tokyo’s cityscape is illuminated by three case studies that are meticulously documented and analyzed.

My favorite chapter is about the narrow and winding ankyo streets of West Tokyo, which were built on top of old canals and have gradually become pedestrian oases. The most famous is Harajuku’s Mozart-Brahms Lane, the chill and ambient twin to Takeshita Street. As in the case of Mozart-Brahms Lane, ankyo streets have often become communal backyards for neighborhoods with flashier public faces.    

I especially appreciate the Conclusion section, in which Almazán demonstrates that corporate-led urbanism has created unwelcoming and visually unappealing spaces that have none of the vibrancy of the more organic spaces fostered by collectives formed by homeowners and small business managers. While urban planning is still necessary, Almazán argues, emergent communities should not be stifled. 

Emergent Tokyo isn’t a book for tourists, but I imagine it will be of interest to anyone who’s curious about urban design. Also, although some of the more academic text might fly above the heads of small children, I think Emergent Tokyo would be a wonderful book to give a kid. The illustrations and diagrams are truly fantastic, and they’re so immersive that I found myself disappearing into the details as I imagined walking through the Tokyo gorgeously laid out across the pages.