2022 | 5 min read
Few pleasures are as restorative for the soul as showing someone new around your city. They quickly identify what’s missing. They have a habit of noticing things you don’t. “Why does everyone dress in the same two colours?” they’ll say. “It’s winter,” you reply, but that doesn’t really answer the question.
I recently had a friend move to Tokyo. He’s found a place near Ginza, so he lives on the opposite side of the city. As he’s from New York, I casually throw in a few geographical markers to help him get oriented in Tokyo. I’m only trying to help. For example, I could travel to meet him on the East Side as the change of scenery is something I’d enjoy. “I’m not often on the East Side,” I’ll say. “Thanks for coming all the way over to the East Side,” he’ll say later.
Of course, I regret all this pretty quickly. Tokyo doesn’t really have an East Side and a West Side. Why had I pretended that it does? I’d become a peddler of false geography. I’d committed the high crime of cryptogeography. Then things took an interesting turn.
Even though the West Side doesn’t exist, he’s been there once already. He’d heard there was a ravine. When he got there, he was disappointed to find that this ravine was quite small and not very deep. It wasn’t like the ravines back in the States. “Next time I’m on the West Side, I’ll have to bring you as my guide,” he tells me. Is he actually in on the joke?
I’ve lived in Tokyo for 15 years, but I’d never once thought of myself as a guide. Like most Tokyoites, my mental map of the city is formed from my own habits, from a few well-worn trails. Other parts are as mysterious to me as Tehran. Important local histories are locked away in Japanese books that, as long as I’m being honest here, I’m just too lazy to read. I worry that future readers of City of Signs will mistake it for an online city guide. “Check it out,” they’ll tell their friends. Deep down we all want to be recommended. “It’s a guide to Tokyo,” they’ll add. “Have fun.”
Instead of east and west sides, Tokyo has lower and higher cities. The Shitamachi is the lower part, the Yamanote the higher. For a while, I’d been confused by the etymology of Yamanote. Literally “hand of the mountains”, it seemed to mean “foothills”. Surveying Tokyo from above after a long elevator ride, I didn’t see any hills. The city looked as flat as a teppanyaki plate that had been run over by a cement truck. I assumed that Yamanote was historical fiction, some Emperor’s New Hills that you weren’t supposed to question. “The hills are looking splendid today,” you’d learn to say.
Only later did the meaning of Yamanote become clear. The western half of Tokyo sits on a huge plateau, roughly 20 metres higher than the eastern half. The boundary starts near Ueno in the north east, skirts around the Imperial Palace, then follows the contour of Tokyo Bay. There are places in central Tokyo you can glimpse actual cliffs. But for the most part the change in elevation is concealed by clusters of tall buildings. To the east of this line is the Shitamachi, or “low city”. To the west is the Yamanote, better understood as “uplands” or “higher ground”.
The Yamanote plateau, which is actually part of the much larger Musashino plain, is riven with little valleys, gorges and depressions, giving areas such as Shibuya and Roppongi their distinctive rolling features. In the Edo period, samurai homes occupied the higher ground, and working-class dwellings the lower-lying land. The idea of hills as aspirational lives on in the names of luxury real-estate developments like Roppongi Hills. But if you find yourself walking up a slope in Tokyo, you’re probably not climbing a hill. Instead, you’re climbing out of a depression.
Shibuya Station is located at the base of one of these depressions in the Yamanote plateau. This section of the Yamanote Line runs along the bottom of an unusually broad valley carved out by the presumably once-mighty Shibuya River, these days more of a foul-smelling stream. Shibuya’s busy scramble crossing, with its time-metered surges of pedestrians, has been compared to droplets of water rolling around the base of a dish. That dish is actually the convergence of at least two gradients.
In his essay A Native Hill, the American naturalist Wendell Berry described walking in Kentucky’s Bluegrass uplands in words that could also describe walking in Shibuya: “I have entered the downflow of the land. The way I am going is the way water goes. There is something comfortable and fit-feeling in this, something free in the yielding to gravity and taking the shortest way down.”
If Berry were alive today, he would be horrified and appalled by the dense built environment and almost total excommunication of nature that is Shibuya. But later he might start to get a feel for the topology. Gradients are one of Tokyo’s few remaining connections to the natural world. Even for the committed urbanist, there’s something comfortable and fit-feeling about plunging down gentle slopes or sudden drops where water once trickled or ran.
I live on the western edge of the Yamanote plateau, before it drops down sharply and becomes the banks of the Tama River. Maybe it’s the English genes, but I feel at home here in a rolling landscape. Tokyo’s East Side, as I might as well start calling it, is a little too flat for my tastes. Still, I’m sympathetic to certain arguments that the coffee tastes better there and that life is somehow more real.
The East Side is said to represent Tokyo as it once was, the more communal and gentle face of the city. This may contain elements of both marketing and magical thinking. The East Side has been completely destroyed and rebuilt twice in the last century, while few people in any part of Tokyo can claim much local ancestry. So it’s perhaps not real history and community but Tokyoites’ suppressed longing for both of these that the East Side best represents.
On clear spring days, when the city seems to vibrate with all possibilities, I could even see myself starting a new life in a new land called the East Side of Tokyo. I would need some time to adapt to the new landscape, which is one giant grid. Whenever I go to the East Side, I’m in danger of being late for appointments. I like to think that when an East-Sider ventures West, he stops at the first gradient and waits there for help to arrive.
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