I am an architect from Greece who
traveled to Japan in the 1990s as an exchange student. Visiting Japan in the
early 1990s was a transformative experience. It led me to a career at
the intersection of Japanese studies and spatial inquiry and expanded my
architectural professional background. I did my PhD on the
Tokaido road and published it as a book in 2004. Since then I have written several other books on subjects
that vary from the Olympic Games to social movements. In the last 16 years, I've taught at Parsons School of Design in New York where I am a professor of
architecture and urbanism. My current project is researching the role of space
and design in prefigurative political movements.
I wrote...
The Tôkaidô Road: Travelling and Representation in EDO and Meiji Japan
The Tokaido Road bridges my two
interests: travel and Japan. I love reading
travelogues and thinking about the role of travel in our individual and
collective imagination. The Tokaido road connects
Tokyo with Kyoto and it was a much-celebrated road in Japan’s Edo era
(1600-1868). It become a densely urbanized megalopolis in the post-WWII
period. In this book, I study the transition of the Tokaido road from the Edo and Meiji eras. I look at everything from maps, to guidebooks, to woodblock
prints, to gardens, textiles, and photography.
The book also brings to life the
broader “movement culture” of the Edo period with its post-stations and
multitude of characters (samurai, merchants, courtesans, poets) who travelled
along the road, as well as the transformations that the establishment of the
railway brought to travel and to the landscape of Japan’s coastal region with
the advent of modernity.
Vaporis’ Breaking Barriers gave me the background knowledge to understand how developed the
system of travel was in Edo Japan. Both in relation to the infrastructure and
the regulations imposed by the Bakufu under the Tokugawa regime. I was
particularly impressed to learn about the sankin kotai, which is the travel expeditions
of the regional lords (the daimyo) for their mandatory alternate residency in
Tokyo, and the different protocols and checks across the roads.
Despite the
harsh laws of the Tokugawa’s system of roads, barriers, relays, and permits, I
was surprised to discover the social reality of the roads and how travelers
managed to overcome the regulations and escape from social restrictions. I also
enjoyed the multiplicity of sources that Vaporis is using to describe the
culture of the road beyond the official records: from diaries and literary
sources to woodblock prints.
Travel in Tokugawa Japan was officially controlled by bakufu and domainal authorities via an elaborate system of barriers, or sekisho, and travel permits; commoners, however, found ways to circumvent these barriers, frequently ignoring the laws designed to control their mobility. In this study, Constantine Vaporis challenges the notion that this system of travel regulations prevented widespread travel, maintaining instead that a "culture of movement" in Japan developed in the Tokugawa era.
Using a combination of governmental documentation and travel literature, diaries, and wood-block prints, Vaporis examines the development of travel as recreation; he discusses the impact of pilgrimage and the…
Tokyo, Form and Spirit was the catalogue for an exhibition at the Walker Center in 1986 with contributions of the most important Japanese urban writers of the 1990s: Henry Smith, Kenneth Frampton, Donald Richie, Marc Treib, Chris Fawcett to name but a few. While I never saw the exhibition, the perspective of the authors created a mental scaffolding that shaped my understanding of the transition from the feudal to modern Japan. Henry
Smith is reading the city of Edo through a bipartite scheme characterized by the sky and the water, or how the city was viewed differently from above, as incarnated by the gaze of the samurai and other authorities, and from below, typically by the commoners who enjoyed life across the city’s waterways. He then searches for this structure in today’s Tokyo where the city’s skyline is dominated by wirescape and high-rise edifices, and the water has almost evaded. Smith’s perspective offers a powerful way to read the visual and material production of the city in light of social stratification bridged with the fundamental human need of sociability and place attachment.
Kenneth Frampton whose critical modern architecture has shaped generations of architecture students was also the critic who introduced to me Japan’s late modern architecture. In this volume he speaks about the work of five important Japanese architects, Tadao Ando, being the most influential for me. For Frampton, Ando is an architect who is critical to the ever-increasing consumerism of the modern city, and his domestic architecture offers introspective domains and spaces of respite for the inhabitant. Refusing the nostalgic ethos, Ando uses sparingly Japanese traditional elements like shoji and tatami while his work is more memorable for its reinforced concrete walls, both continuing and departing from sukiya style architecture. While other architects of the 1990s offered an apotheosis of the bustling Japanese city, an enclosure is the touchstone of Ando’s practice.
Essays discuss the evolution of Tokyo's art and architecture from the seventeenth century to the present and the coexistence of technology and tradition
Tokyo by Jinnai Hidenobu was
influential for me both as a source of information about the history of Tokyo and for its methodology of research. The author discovers the city via walking
and traveling across its water routes, an experiential methodology which he
first developed in his study of Venice. With the assistance of visuals, both
historical and newly drawn based on his field observations, Jinnai explores
modern-day Tokyo. His starting point is that Tokyo seems an anomaly when
compared with other world cities in its lack of historical structures which is
attributed to a series of wars and disasters that radically transformed the
city’s physical environment.
The impressive discovery of this inquiry
however is that despite the perceived newness of Tokyo, the spirit of Edo
(Tokyo’s name during the Tokugawa period, 1600-1868) has not vanished in
today’s modern city. Through this book, we learn that the differences between
the high city and the low city of Edo still survive, and we also learn that
Tokyo is a hilly city, characterized by a complex intersection of plateaux and
valleys, an understanding that might be obscured for many today due to the
extensive use of the subway. One of the most interesting chapters is the
“Cosmology of a City of Water” where the authors take us on a journey along the
Sumida River.
Here the author recollects the markets, amusement centers, and
open waterside spaces of Tokyo in the Edo and Meiji eras with the assistance of
a fascinating array of woodblock prints from Illustrated books of the city
during these periods. All this is to claim that the most interesting places in
today’s Tokyo are often those that “slipped through the net of urban planning
bent on modernization” and to advocate that planners should view the city as a
lived space rather than as a space of development.
Tokyo: destroyed by the earthquake of 1923 and again by the firebombing of World War II. Does anything remain of the old city? The internationally known Japanese architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu set out on foot to rediscover the city of Tokyo. Armed with old maps, he wandered through back alleys and lanes, trying to experience the city's space as it had been lived by earlier residents. He found that, despite an almost completely new cityscape, present-day inhabitants divide Tokyo's space in much the same way that their ancestors did two hundred years before. Jinnai's holistic perspective is enhanced by his…
I was extremely lucky to conduct
my PhD research on Tokaido road in the 1990s. Books by scholars of Japanese Studies like Marily Ivy were
extremely influential and opened my eyes to aspects that would not have been
visible to me otherwise.
The Discourses of the Vanishing was
one such book that dispelled deeply rooted myths of Japan, especially
the belief that Japan is a fully modernized country, that Japanese society is
monolithic, and that Japan’s most noteworthy locales are its highly urbanized
areas. What brought me to the book was Ivy’s examination of the Exotic Japan
campaign of Japan’s railways in the late 1980s. This campaign was woven with
powerful notions of furusato (nostalgia for one’s native place), neo-Japonesque
exoticism, and other imaginary references of post-bubble Japan meant to appeal
to women as new targets of Japan’s consumption campaigns.
Across the book’s six
chapters, Ivy also takes us to Japan’s mountains such as Mount Osore, introduces
people at the margins of Japan’s society, such as blind mediums who are
recalling the dead and itinerant troops, and speaks about ideas, nuances, and
ideologies that might not be highlight visible in today’s megalopolis but are
haunting the nation from its premodern past.
Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this conjoining of ethnography, history and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties, as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early 20th-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins.…
Laura Nenzi’s book discusses the
role of travel in the formation of identity, using primary sources that derive from travel
accounts of Edo Japan. Nenzi looks at personal travel diaries and brings an
anthropological view on the subject seeing travel as a self-discovery process,
while also paying attention to differences in the experience of the literati
travelers and the less educated commoners for whom, with the rise of the market
economy, the roads and their pleasures became more accessible. This brings to
life the changes in the earlier literati tradition of the meisho (famous
places) with the rise of commodification of both products (meibutsu) and
religious practices.
Nenzi’s most unique contribution is shining a light on the travels of women, which still remain an elusive subject in historical
narratives of Japan. Nenzi shows that the hierarchies of Edo Japan were defied
by the transgressive potential of travel, as the roads offered possibilities
for escape from the everyday social restrictions. In this book, Nenzi weaves
literary accounts together with visual material, genres that shaped both individual
and collective spatial imaginaries in Edo Japan.
In the Edo period (1600-1868), status- and gender-based expectations largely defined a person's place and identity in society. The wayfarers of the time, however, discovered that travel provided the opportunity to escape from the confines of the everyday. Cultured travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote travel memoirs to celebrate their profession as belle-lettrists. For women in particular the open road and the blank page of the diary offered a precious opportunity to create personal hierarchies defined less by gender and more by culture and refinement.After the mid-eighteenth century - which saw the popularization of culture and the rise…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of citations and interviews with more than 250 key protagonists, experts, and witnesses.
So far, the book is the main -- and only -- antidote to a slew of early partisan “Benghazi” polemics, and the first to put the attack in its longer term historical, political, and social context. If you want to understand some of the events that have shaped present-day America, from political polarization and the election of Donald Trump, to January 6, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russian expansionism, and the current Israel-Hamas war, I argue, you need to understand some of the twists and turns of America's most infamous "non-scandal, scandal.”
I was in Benghazi well before, during, and after the attack as a US diplomat and co-director of a medical NGO. I have written three books, and have been a contributor to The NYT, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, Salon, The Financial Times, Newsweek, and others.
On September 11, 2012, Al Qaeda proxies attacked and set fire to the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing a US Ambassador and three other Americans. The attack launched one of the longest and most consequential 'scandals' in US history, only to disappear from public view once its political value was spent.
Written in a highly engaging narrative style by one of a few Western experts on Libya, and decidely non-partisan, Benghazi!: A New History is the first to provide the full context for an event that divided, incited, and baffled most of America for more than three years, while silently reshaping…
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