Description
Book SynopsisThis is a freaking great book and I highly recommend it... if you are passionate about the history of 'the world's greatest city,' this book is something you must have in your collection. JapanThis.com. Edward Seidensticker's A History of Tokyo 1867-1989 tells the fascinating story of Tokyo's transformation from the Shogun's capital in an isolated Japan to the largest and the most modern city in the world. With the same scholarship and sparkling style that won him admiration as the foremost translator of great works of Japanese literature, Seidensticker offers the reader his brilliant vision of an entire society suddenly wrenched from an ancient feudal past into the modern world in a few short decades, and the enormous stresses and strains that this brought with it. Originally published as two volumes, Seidensticker's masterful work is now available in a handy, single paperback volume. Whether you're a history buff or Tokyo-bound traveller looking to learn more, this insightful book offers a fascinating look at how the Tokyo that we know came to be. This edition contains an introduction by Donald Richie, the acknowledged expert on Japanese culture who was a close personal friend of the author, and a preface by geographer Paul Waley that puts the book into perspective for modern readers.
Trade Review"There can be few cities in the world that live, pulsate, and breathe through their geography as Tokyo does, few cities with a history that shifts through the creases of space as does that of Tokyo. This is particularly ironic in a city whose neighborhoods today hold few distinctive features and whose gentle topography has been all but obscured by batteries of building. But it was not always so, and what better way is there of writing Tokyo's history than by reflecting this shifting geography as neighborhoods prospered and declined while others, more aspirational, climbed up the socio-spacial ladder? This is precisely what Edward Seidensticker does in the pages of [this book]."
--Books on Asia
