The Tokyo Model: Lessons in Slum Non-Clearance from the World’s First “Megacity”

November 20, 2014, 5 p.m.

Note time change to 5 p.m. Room is the usual: Wurster 106.

Co-Presented by the Center for Japanese Studies

Jordan Sand will present his research on the activities of a Tokyo slumlord at the turn of the 20th century. Sand is Professor of Japanese History and Culture at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He teaches modern Japanese history and other topics in East Asian history, as well as urban history and the world history of food. He has a doctorate in history from Columbia University and an MA in architecture history from the University of Tokyo. His research and writing has focused on architecture, urbanism, material culture and the history of everyday life.

House and Home in Modern Japan (Harvard, 2004) explores the ways that westernizing reformers reinvented Japanese domestic space and family life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most recent book, Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (University of California Press, 2013), analyzes problems of history and memory in the postindustrial city. He has also examined the comparative history of urban fires and firefighting, the modernization and globalization of Japanese food (including sushi, miso, and MSG), and the history of furniture and interiors, and topics in the study of heritage and museums. He is presently working on a study of manifestations of colonialism in physical forms ranging from bodily comportment to urban planning.

The complete PowerPoint presentation can be viewed here.
Video of the presentation can be viewed here.

Readings:

Jordan Sand, Property in Two Fire Regimes: From Edo to Tokyo from Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment

FOR FURTHER READING ON KEYWORDS:

Working Words: New Approaches to Japanese Studies by Jordan Sand, Alan Tansman, and Dennis Washburn

Related Blog Posts:

"Invoking" the Spirits of History: Tokyo's Nishimaru-cho by Jon Pitt
Tokyo's Flow: The Importance of Material in Historical Tokyo by Yael Hadar