Ryu Lurking in Japanese Cities

Harmonizing Qi Through Invisible Environmental Forces

The act of “reading the city” is a form of wisdom indispensable for understanding the multidimensional cultural aspects of a place, such as the spirit and culture born from it and the ingenuity of the people’s lives there. However, we face a situation where this fundamental principle has been almost entirely forgotten, meaning that no one truly knows the place where they live. One might ask how culture and spirit can possibly emerge when the people living there are ignorant of their own location. Yet place is not limited to something based on land in the generally recalled sense.

It is therefore profoundly intriguing to contemplate once again how cities are selected and established, and how they have managed to prosper through the tireless efforts of the people living there to reach the present day. When one attempts to truly understand this perspective, a multitude of circumstances emerge that cannot be spoken of regarding the city in a unified manner. These are the “specific circumstances of the city,” which represent a perspective of wisdom concerning how our ancestors possessed an intimate knowledge of the characteristics of a place and designed the city without defying them. The reason this perspective is considered important for the future is that current city design has conducted development that literally reverses the wisdom accumulated by our ancestors. Consequently, Japanese cities harbor a vulnerability that leaves them completely unable to cope when the ferocity of natural disasters strikes.

To begin with, considering natural disasters as enemies or objects of fear is in itself a shallow view. Natural disasters are something humanity has confronted time and again, and within those experiences there must have been countless lessons and resignations. Through this relationship with nature, humans repeated a process of updating and discarding their ways of thinking, eventually transplanting the important ideas that remained into city design. Thinking about how this connects to the modern city is equivalent to asking how we should decipher the context of the city.

If you ask why I consider this perspective important, it is because there are “specific circumstances inherent to Japan” when viewed macroscopically. Although it has a narrow landmass, it is a place where four tectonic plates, namely the Pacific Plate, the Philippine Sea Plate, the North American Plate, and the Eurasian Plate, all intersect to make it the location where the world’s most massive earthquakes occur. In other words, at the very foundation of its land, Japan is a rare country where one can hold the strongest consciousness and awareness of standing upon the Earth. At the same time, it is the country with the highest risk of disasters such as massive earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. However, these are not things that have started only now but are conditions that have remained unchanged since ancient times. Unless the Japanese archipelago moves significantly outside of the plates, avoiding these risks is impossible. Therefore, the people who became the ancestors of us Japanese also faced these natural disasters repeatedly, and each time they struggled and contemplated how to build the places where they lived. Personally, I believe that the true wisdom passed down continuously from Japanese ancestors lies here, yet such a way of thinking is hardly held by the residents of large cities like Tokyo, Nagoya, or Osaka.