Tokyo and London: Comparative Conceptions of the City [1979]

Title

Japan: A Comparative View

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Academic Units

East Asian Languages and Cultures

Published Here

May 28, 2026

“Tokyo and London” was in many ways a direct followup to “Tokyo as an Idea” (for which see [INSERT LINK to work recently put on my Academic Commons list], and reflects the period of the mid to late 1970s when I completely shifted the focus of my research efforts to the history of the city of Tokyo, of which the article on Shinjuku in A&U was a critical first step.

“Tokyo and London” was first presented at a conference in April 1977 in Cuernavaca, Mexico (a popular international conference site) on the theme of “Comparative Views” of Japan, across disciplines, organized by Albert Craig (a Harvard historian who had been my PhD thesis advisor). I was one of the younger members of the group (which included such established scholars as Ronald Dore, Marius Jansen, John Pelzel, Doi Takeo, and Kozo Yamamura), but the discussions were lively and it was Dore who noted the popularity is Psalm 23 as a reflection of British attachment to the idea of the Lord as “my shepherd.”

Re-reading my own long contribution on “Tokyo and London,” it struck me a overly long and detailed, the same sort of problem in my “Tokyo as an Idea” (available on Academic Commons) of excessive detail. Still, it was detail that is not easily available elsewhere in English, and I believe that even now it is worth consulting.

With respect to the paper on the comparison of Tokyo and London, I have come to feel that the two diagrams provided were of particular graphic attraction, appearing early in the paper and worthy of close study. Fig 1, “Comparative Population Growth of Tokyo and London” is a revealing representation of the parallel status of Tokyo and London and the two largest cities in the world from the 17th to the mid-20th century. As the detailed caption reveals, the evidence is mixed and not always reliable, but the general point that these two island-nation capitals were the world’s largest cities for the early modern period into the 1930s is a gripping image.
Figure 2, “National Land Use in Japan and England” (as of 1966) was felicitously made available in a then-recent geographical study (Prue Dempster, Japan Advances: A Geographical Study, London: Metheuen 1967), very nicely designed and expressive of the dramatic geographcal contrasts between Japan and England.

In re-reading this paper (as with the earlier paper on “Tokyo as an Idea”), I am struck by the diversity and interest of the many book titles cited in the footnotes (most in English), revealing how much interesting thinking about different environments was being produced in that era of the late ‘60s and early 70s. Just to single out some of the numerous titles that greatly influenced my own thinking about the varieties of changing human enviroments, I would head the list with an anthology of the writings of J. B Jackson (Landscapes:Selected Writings of J.B. Jackson, ed Erwin Zube, Univ of Mass Press, 1970), whose writings did much to give shape to all my own emerging ideas about the nature of “landscapes,” which is really what conceptions of the city are all about. Others cited in my notes were (in order of initial publication): Robert Smith (“Pre-Industrial Urbanism in Japan,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 9:2:2 1960, an urban anthropologist who organized the workshop that led to “Tokyo as an Idea”); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (1964); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973); Lyn Lofland, A World of Strangers (1973); and Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia (1974).

One final note about the “Tokyo and London” paper is to mention a review of the volume Japan: A Comparative View in which it appeared, written in French for the well-known journal Annales: Histoire, Science Sociales (36:5, Sept-Oct 1981, pp 855-859) by Augustin Berque (b. 1942, a geographer and leading French Japanologist). Here is an Google translation of what he said about my paper on Tokyo and London:
The comparison of Tokyo (Edo) and London over the last three centuries—a period during which these two cities vied for the top spot in the world—allows Henry D. Smith II to highlight, and above all, to explain brilliantly [“de maniere lumineuse”], several of the specific characteristics of the Japanese city in general, while also recalling the diversity of the Western paradigm. Certain well-worn themes—but not entirely elucidated—of Japanese urban life, such as the lesser opposition between city and countryside or the presence of nature in the built environment, receive a convincing interpretation here, firstly because it is nuanced: thus, urban quality—as opposed to rural quality—has never been the same in Edo and Kyoto (any more than it is between London and Paris). Between London and Tokyo, the differences are obviously numerous; But the similarities (which are often also differences compared to cities in continental Europe and China) are also striking. We know, for example, of the absence of city walls; H. D. Smith does not hesitate to analyze its antecedents and resonances; let us cite one of the characteristics he attributes to it (as well as to other causes): this historical absence, in both cities, of “strong civic space,” due primarily, for London, to the original duality of Westminster and the City, and for Edo-Tokyo to the compartmentalization that the shogun imposed on urban life—, which today helps to explain that the two cities have suffered less than others from the atomization and loss of identity of modern metropolises.