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CONTEMPORARY JAPAN: URBAN & RURAL LIFE Tokyo |
| The Japanese archipelago — with more than one thousand islands in all — spans diverse living environments: snowy mountains in the northern island of Hokkaido; bustling cities such as Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka; tropical rice paddies in southern Kyushu. In this video series, Harvard University professors Theodore Bestor and Helen Hardacre describe the character of both urban and rural life in Japan. |
Theodore Bestor :: Sometimes Japanese refer to Tokyo as a big collection of villages. Of course, it’s not a village; it’s one of the world’s largest cities, highly industrialized and all those sorts of things. But, what I think they mean when they talk about it as a collection of villages is that Tokyo, like many Japanese cities, still retains a strong sense of neighborhood, of very small spatially discrete, socially discrete, areas that have a real flavor and character of their own. Oftentimes these neighborhoods are organized around a Shinto shrine. They may be organized around some other local institutions: a neighborhood association; a local shopkeepers’ association that may be sort of a Chamber of Commerce, but for an area that may only be eight or ten square blocks, so these are very small, small-scale units. |
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