Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road

Abstract

Alisa Freedman’s first monograph takes on the challenge of identifying the cultural forces in the first four decades of the 20th century that turned Tokyo’s early mass transit system into one of Japan’s defining spaces of urban modernity. Readers who wish to find out how the system was built, altered, and used from a technical and economic perspective should look elsewhere, but those interested in the overwhelming impact of rails and roads on everyday life in a rapidly changing modern metropolis need look no further than Tokyo in Transit. The significance of mass transportation for prewar Tokyo and its inhabitants emerges in Freedman’s account of commuter trains, streetcars, buses, stations, passengers, and transport workers depicted in fiction, quasi-fiction, print journalism, and a range of popular media. The result could have been a mere compendium of interesting trivia (e.g. Tokyo Pan Bakery in Shinjuku was the site of Tokyo’s first neon sign), but the presentation of such kaleidoscopic detail does much more by demonstrating how those who depicted mass transit ‘responded to the contradictions they perceived in Japanese urban modernity, recorded consumer and social patterns often omitted from historical accounts, and exposed the effects of rapid change on the individual’ (p. 1). At stake in weaving together such an account are the ramifications of a methodology that analyzes literary and non-literary representations as records of the historical moment in which they were produced. In Freedman’s analysis, these representations do not constitute an archive with more or less reducible meanings with which to formulate a historical narrative, but neither are they texts with irreducible meanings floating free of the verifiable historical record. They lie somewhere in between—and it is this tension that lies at the heart of the study’s strengths and weaknesses. Negotiating between nuanced literary analysis and workaday historiography, Freedman presents a portrait of what it may have felt like to ride a commuter train in prewar Japan from the perspective of different genders, classes, ages, and, it must be said, pathologies. In doing so, she attempts no less a feat than writing a history of mass transit based on a set of contemporary observations made in written, cinematic, and material forms that are valuable precisely because of the telling elusiveness of their immediacy. The achievement of Tokyo in Transit is to keep this unsteady archive on track to reveal unacknowledged vistas of modern experience, but the ride is made bumpy by analytical imprecision concerning the capacity of literature and other cultural representations to serve as historical evidence for claims about society in general.

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