In this interesting study of Japanese urban space, the author writes that when he thinks of the Western city he envisions streets and their patterns of relationship, and dominant centers and peripheral places. But when he thinks of Japanese cities he sees scattered points with no clear inter-relationship and often no clear internal form.
Although many have observed this, few have found, as the author has, reason to learn from it. Veteran 19th-century traveler Isabella Bird, ordinarily so perspicacious, discovered an amorphous amalgam of great, featureless patches in an endless urban landscape. Educator and author W.E. Griffis discovered only temporariness and featurelessness. Zoologist Edward Morse said that "having got a bird's-eye view of one city, we have seen them all -- the minor variations consisting, for the most part, in the inequalities of the sites upon which they rest."
Even into our times, the Japanese city has been found unfocused, confused, chaotic. Novelist Hal Porter, writing as late as 1968, said that Tokyo was "a freak weed sprung from a crack in history and drenched by a fertilizer that makes it monstrous but not mighty, immense but immoral, overgrown and undercivilized." And this despite "two unparalleled opportunities (the 1923 earthquake and the 1945 bombings) to disentangle and straighten out its Gordian knot of streets."
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