Commemoration, Conservation, and Commodification: Representing the Past in Present-Day Tokyo

Abstract

Various commentators have observed that Tokyo is missing the grand monuments that are a feature of many other large capital cities. Indeed, it could even be said that the city lacks a physical sense of its own history. This paper examines these propositions and lays out a number of reasons why this may be so. I argue here that the treatment of the past in contemporary Tokyo can be understood through the lens of commemoration, conservation, and commodification. While Tokyo may lack grand memorials and significant conservation areas of historical importance, I argue both that the city contains smaller, more improvised monuments and that consumption objects and indeed re-created streetscapes furnish a sense of the past in today’s city. I suggest at the same time that within Tokyo there has been a concentration on bringing in elements of a Western urbanism considered more modern or, recently, more exotic, and that the past has tended to be consigned to places outside Tokyo. There is in sum little space in Tokyo’s ever-changing landscape for a physical representation of the past. These claims about the contemporary city are placed in the context of geographical writing on memorialisation and related themes such as heritage in a broader Asian and European context.