Where the Chimneys Are Seen. Courtesy Japan Foundation.
The Japanese term, Shitamachi (下町) can be literally translated to “downtown,” since shita means down and machi means town, but some translators and scholars like Edward Seidensticker have opted to use the term “low city,”1 to acknowledge that the area often referred to as shitamachi is geographically low-lying on the eastern side of Tokyo. It also differentiates it from the western notion of “downtown.” The term shitamachi in the context of Tokyo dates back to the Edo period (1603-1868), when the ruling Tokugawa shogunate of the time founded Edo (later known as Tokyo) as the capital and built Edo Castle (where today’s Imperial Palace stands) in the center, on top of a hill and placed the rest of the upper class and samurai class on the hilly land west of the castle.2 This high-lying area is known as yamanote which means “hand of the mountain.”
Despite changes in regimes and times, the terms shitamachi and yamanote have remained in the popular imagination and in language over the centuries. Beyond topography, the two terms have carried connotations about the people who occupy it and the lifestyles that come with them. Yamanote was where the upper class lived and on the contrary, shitamachi was where the lower class merchants, artisans, entertainers, prostitutes, and commoners lived. Though the capital including shitamachi and yamanote were both part of the city of Edo, as human geographer Paul Waley states, “it would be exaggerating to suggest that Edo and Shitamachi were coterminous, but there was certainly a large degree of conflation”3 and the term Edokko (child of Edo) also persists today both as a self-identified term and a descriptor for a certain kind of people hailing from Tokyo. “From early times,” says Waley, "Shitamachi the place was closely associated with the people who lived there and whose alleged attributes imparted to the location, its rich texture of social imagery."4 Taking clues from the historian Matsunosuke Nishiyama, he also adds that “the Edokko embodied some of the traits of rebelliousness and bravado associated with the more impulsive, rough and independent ways of the people of the less developed east of Japan—seen, for example, in acting style for the kabuki stage.”5 Tomoko Seta in her dissertation on socialist politics and performance in shitamachi during 1904-1912 says of contemporary notions of shitamachi by socialists at the time as “the embodiment of the Edo commoners’ perceived vibrant spirit, a site bypassed by urban development, or even a reservoir of potential revolutionaries.”6
Even as regimes changed and the name of the city changed from Edo to Tokyo, shitamachi by extension of being conflated with Edo has continued to be a symbol of Edo lifestyle and hence also the past. Yamanote, on the other hand, is where the samurai and the upper class that were quick to embrace Western influences as a symbol of affluence lived and as a result, became connoted with ideas of future and capital. Though, yamanote is used less frequently to signal a region in Tokyo, some of the most expensive neighborhoods are on west of the Imperial Palace. In some films in the series, like Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937), you might notice that the rich officials walk down a hill to interact with the poorer commoners. In Shohei Imamura’s colorful epic Eijanaika (1981) set at the end of the Edo period and the end of the shogunate, we witness the banding together of commoners of shitamachi in opposition to the declining and increasingly violent samurai class, many of whom adopt western attire in order to stay afloat in the social ranks.
Street of Shame. Courtesy of Janus Films.
When I first set about curating this series, as a shitamachi born and bred person, I confidently started by selecting films that are set in the areas where I grew up (my dad is an itinerant acupuncturist born along the river in east Tokyo, with a Korean father who ran a laundry shop and stole food from the U.S. army to feed his ten children). I knew it would include films set in Asakusa (The Discarnates, 1988), the entertainment district of Tokyo which is likely the most cited area in tourist guides as typically shitamachi,7 as well as films set in the lower sections of Ueno (Record of a Tenement Gentleman, 1947), films that include the postwar black market (Stray Dog, 1949), films around Yoshiwara and other red-light districts (Suzaki Paradise: Red Light, 1956; Street of Shame, 1957; Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate, 1957), films about laborers and factory workers (Still I Live On, 1951; The Sunshine Girl, 1963), and of course films with “Shitamachi” in the title (Shitamachi [Downtown], 1951). I started asking people I know for their recommended shitamachi films. When one person suggested Mikio Naruse's Ginza Cosmetics (1951), I asked, “is Ginza shitamachi?” because the Ginza that I grew up with was closer to New York’s Fifth Avenue, lined with galleries and designer brand stores, though arguably Ginza also has alleyways (another shitamachi marker)8 and small merchant stores as well as an entertainment district. To my question, they responded, “Where does shitamachi begin and end?”
The truth is, shitamachi and yamanote are not state-defined boundaries and the boundaries are always contested. It is not like Brooklyn or Queens which are part of New York City but also each individual boroughs, differentiated from Manhattan. There is no address in Tokyo that ends with “Shitamachi, Tokyo.” And in fact, as the city of Edo grew, shitamachi, which was originally just a small area right by the Edo Castle, spread farther east and north. To further complicate, the shitamachi area has been razed at least three times in its history. First, the Great Fire of Meireki in 1657, then the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, and again by the air raids during WWII. In each form of destruction shitamachi has changed its shape architecturally and geographically.9 Additionally, with the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the construction boom thereafter, the area has gone through development and gentrification. In fact, the Shitamachi Museum in Ueno was created in response to what some people felt was a disappearing way of life after the Olympics.
The more that I learned about the history of shitamachi, the less I was certain of whether a film is a shitamachi film, especially based on geography. What became a useful compass was “psychogeography,” which also is a term with blurry boundaries that has been used and adapted loosely. Generally said to have originated from the Marxist theorist Guy Debord, the practice seeks to explore the urban landscape with “roots in dadaism and surrealism... which explored ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination.”10 A contemporary adopter of a psychogeographic approach to a city is writer Rebecca Solnit, who among her many works has co-edited a trilogy of atlases that map the cities of San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York. In her introduction to Nonstop Metropolis, the last of the trilogy and a beautiful atlas of New York, she writes, “Each of us is an atlas of sorts, already knowing how to navigate some portion of the world, containing innumerable versions of place as experience and desire and fear, as route and landmark and memory. So a city and its citizens constitute a living library.”11 The many maps of New York in Nonstop Metropolis lay out different narratives of the city such as a map called “Capital of Capital”12 that points out landmarks related to money in New York, as well as “Singing New York,” which transposes snippets of lyrics from popular songs that sing about particular sections of New York with the sub-header “The New York of Dreams.”13
This approach to a city and geography that imbues narratives both historical and imagined felt appropriate in approaching shitamachi, which as many before me have argued has “been conflated with ideas about shitamachi as a way of life.”14 Similar to Nonstop Metropolis, which used different ideas and signifiers to map different narratives of New York, I have also used different signifiers to guide me. Some, as explained earlier, are geographical and location-based (mainly on the east side of Tokyo). Other indicators are visual, such as the nagaya (wooden tenement or row houses) seen in Ozu’s Story of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) and Sadao Yamanaka’s Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937), or the rivers in the east of Tokyo, like in Yuzo Kawashima's Suzaki Paradise (1956); others are by profession, whether they be sex workers and geishas (Flowing, 1956; Eijanaika, 1981), merchants (Tora-san, 1969), day laborers (Still I Live On, 1951), or factory workers (The Sunshine Girl, 1964). Food and language too, play a huge factor. You might notice that many of the characters in the films speak fast and colorful language. Beloved actor Kiyoshi Atsumi, who plays the iconic Tora-san and the foul-mouthed older brother in Kigeki: Onna Wa Dokyo (1969),was especially practiced in this particular speak where "bakayaro," or "idiot" or "bastard," are thrown around as punctuation, terms both of endearment and used to pick a fight.
A Comedy: Japanese Grandmas. Courtesy of Shochiku Films
When seen together, different narrative groups arise. Stories of resistance against class oppression, against consumerism, stories of the U.S. postwar occupation, stories in solidarity with the common people, stories of the poor, and stories of the marginalized, but also stories of celebration, the arts, festivities, nostalgia for a time passed, irreverence towards authority, and, as the subtitle of film scholar Arthur Jr. Noletti’s book on director Heinosuke Gosho (Where Chimneys Are Seen, 1953) goes, stories of “laughter through tears.”15 Perhaps due to the class implications of shitamachi, the setting seems to be fertile for humanistic and politically engaged films. A term that crops up when talking about shitamachi is ninjyo (人情), which means sentimentality, empathy, or humanness. Many of the characters care about their neighbors (sometimes too much) or are emotive in ways that are opposite to perhaps the reserved image of the upper class. Humor and laughter is also a big part of this and is represented throughout the series. Kigeki: Nippon No Obaachan (A Comedy: Japanese Grandmas) is a social satire on Japan's aging society problem scripted by the inimitable Yoko Mizuki, and rakugo (a sit-down comedy) is an art-form born in shitamachi (see Yoshimitsu Morita's take in Something Like It, which features many real-life rakugo artists of the time).
These concerns and narratives are not only reflected in the stories of the films but also in the stories behind them. It is not a coincidence that the three films from 1956 are all around stories of sex workers and geishas. The government at the time was in talks to implement an anti-prostitution law which took effect the following year. Still I Live On (1951), by Tadashi Imai, was the first film by the Marxist filmmaker who banded with other filmmakers like Satsuo Yamamoto (Street Without Sun) to start an independent production movement after leading the largest labor struggle in post-war Japanese history, which played out in the country’s largest film studio, Toho. The films made under the U.S. occupation years (1945-1952), such as Stray Dog (1951), while under strict censorship, uses the atmosphere of uncertainty and fear to create a noir about a detective whose own morality is tested in increasingly murky territory. Even one of the most populist approaches, the beloved Tora-san film series by Yoji Yamada is a commentary on consumerism post-1964 Tokyo Olympics and the rise of consumer culture as the country heads into its “economic miracle.” Ahead of filming the 50th installment of the Tora-san series this year, Yamada reflects that the popularity of Tora-san lies in the fact that Tora-san helped to laugh away the shame of not contemplating “the true nature of happiness in favor of focusing on the accumulation of material wealth.”16
The Discarnates. Courtesy of Shochiku Films.
Instead of using “Low City,” I have intentionally kept “downtown” as shitamachi’s translation for the series to point to where this series is happening: Film Forum. Located in downtown New York, while it is not necessarily topographically low-lying, it is geographically south in the city. And as with shitamachi, and as Solnit’s book shows, “downtown New York” too is full of narratives, myths, characters, and histories. If some of the narratives around shitamachi is about the marginalized, about economic inequality, about the celebration of the arts, about tight-knit communities and festivities, can we not find these stories in New York too? While shitamachi is certainly a term closely tied to nostalgia for a time passed (possibly one that was idealized and never really existed; see Nobuhiko Obayashi’s The Discarnates, 1988 for a loving critique of its dangers and allure), cannot the ethos and the narratives that shitamachi has birthed and continue to put forth today of resistance and of community practice and of laughter and joy be activated into lived experience?
As a final thought about this series, I leave you with Solnit’s evocative passage that speaks to the curatorial attempt in exploring Tokyo's shitamachi:
By a good map I mean an aesthetic one, a map that is an invitation to the imagination, a map that offers a fresh view of the familiar or an introduction to the unfamiliar or finds the latter in the former. If every map is a story, most of them are mysteries that invite you to solve them while remaining forever unresolved, in that they indicate more —more past, more future, more adventure, more travelers.17
1. Edward Seidensticker. Low City, High City Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake.
2. Paul Waley. “Moving the Margins of Tokyo.” Urban Studies Vol. 39, No. 9, 2002, 1534.
3. Ibid. 1535
4. Ibid. 1535
5. Ibid. 1536
6. Tomoko Seto, “Spectacular Socialism: Politics and Popular Performance in Shitamachi Tokyo, 1904-1918” PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2014. ProQuest (UMI 3615674), 4.
7. An example is a National Geographic Tourist Guide article like https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/destinations/asia/japan/local-guide-tokyo/
8. Taito-ku Shitamachi Museum. Taito-ku Shitamachi Museum An Illustrated Guide. 2010. 10
9. Moe Joi, Haruhiko Goto and Shun Yoshie's “Study on Shared Regional Images and Narrative Groups within the Tokyo Shitamachi Area. -Focusing on the Shitamachi Image before the development of the Tokyo-Skytree-.” Journal of the City Planning Institute of Japan, Vol. 51 No. 3, October 2016, 1117 was a very helpful resource for me.
10. Tate. “Art Term: Psychogeography”. Accessed April 12, 2019. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/psychogeography.
11. Rebecca Solnit, et al. Nonstop Metropolis a New York City Atlas. University of California Press, 2016. 1
12. Ibid. 22
13. Ibid. 14
14. Theodore C. Bestor. “The Shitamachi Revival.” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan. Vol. 5. (1999): 74.
15. Arthur Jr. Nolletti. The Cinema of Gosho Heinosuke: Laughter Through Tears. Indiana University Press. 2005.
16. Yoji Yamada. “Regarding the ‘Tora-san’ 50th Anniversary Project.” From the promotional material put together by Shochiku Co. Ltd. 2018.
17. Rebecca Solnit, et al. Nonstop Metropolis a New York City Atlas. University of California Press, 2016.11.
Shitamachi: Tales of Downtown Tokyo is showing October 18 – November 7, 2019 at Film Forum in New York.