都市を読むReading a City

Reading a city is a form of wisdom indispensable for knowing the many layers of culture in a place: the spirit and culture born there, and the ingenuity of the people's lives. Yet this basic practice has been almost entirely forgotten, and we now face a situation in which hardly anyone knows the place where they live. How could culture and spirit possibly arise when the people living in a place do not know it? Place, moreover, is not limited to land in the sense we usually call to mind.

It is therefore fascinating to ask again how a city is chosen, how it comes into being, and how the people who live there have kept it prospering, generation after generation, to the present. When we try to understand this view in earnest, many circumstances emerge that cannot be spoken of in one voice as "the city." These are the "circumstances particular to each city," a view of wisdom about how our ancestors knew the character of a place intimately and designed cities without going against it. I think this view will matter more from now on, because present-day urban design has pursued development that literally inverts the wisdom our ancestors accumulated. As a result, Japanese cities carry a fragility that leaves them unable to cope when the force of natural disaster strikes.

To begin with, regarding natural disasters as enemies or objects of fear is itself shallow. Humanity has faced natural disasters again and again, and there must have been countless lessons and acts of resignation in those encounters. In their relationship with nature, people kept updating and discarding their ways of thinking, and in the end they transplanted the important ideas that remained into city design. To think about how this reaches the cities of today is the same as asking how to read the context of a city.

Why do I think this view is important? Seen on a large scale, Japan has "circumstances particular to Japan." Although the land is narrow, it lies where four plates meet, the Pacific, Philippine Sea, North American, and Eurasian, and it is the place in the world where the largest earthquakes occur. At the very root of its land, Japan is a rare country where one can most strongly feel and know that one stands on the Earth. It is also the country with the highest risk of disasters such as huge earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. None of this began now. These are conditions unchanged since ancient times. Unless the archipelago moved far beyond the plates, these risks cannot be avoided, so the people who became our ancestors also faced these disasters again and again, and each time struggled to think how to make the places where they lived. Personally, I believe the true wisdom handed down from Japan's ancestors lies here, yet people living in large cities such as Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka hardly hold this way of thinking.

But city dwellers have merely forgotten. The environment in which actual cities were founded still rests on old wisdom. By reading it, we begin to see what it means to ask "What, after all, is a city?" One main reason to ask is that the risk of a huge earthquake within the next thirty years is high. Broadly there are three: an earthquake directly beneath Tokyo, striking the capital itself; the Nankai Trough megaquake, striking a wide area from Tokai to Kyushu; and the Japan Trench and Kuril Trench earthquake, striking the eastern coast over a wide area. These are known historically to be linked, and the Tokara Islands earthquake swarm in the island chain south of Kyushu last year is reported to have raised the risk of a huge earthquake. Historically, an eruption of Mount Fuji has also followed such earthquakes, so enormous damage from earthquake, tsunami, and eruption across a wide area is expected.

In the case of the Nankai Trough megaquake, it has been shown that on the Pacific coast, with violent shaking making it impossible to move, a tsunami as tall as a ten-story building arrives only two or three minutes after the quake. We have already entered a stage in which we should not idly ask whether such a blow to Japan will come, but seriously imagine, at the personal level, when it will. People living in Japan must therefore prepare every day, including mentally, on the premise that an earthquake may strike now. Many people are mistaken at this point in thinking that Tokyo and Osaka are the safest places. When disasters like those above occur, the highest risk is in the large cities. Everyone needs to grasp, as a basic point, that the idea of safety in city life inverts in a natural disaster. When an earthquake strikes directly beneath Tokyo, public order in Tokyo will collapse completely. In Osaka, even if the Nankai Trough megaquake occurs, deaths are expected to come more from fires in dense districts of old wooden houses than from the direct damage of the quake. Kyoto and Nara, with their old urban structures, are in the same position, and in this they differ from Tokyo.

These three disasters are events on a large scale, but because of Japan's circumstances we must think from the premise that we stand in such a place to begin with. In particular, if a huge earthquake or eruption occurs, a city is likely to be destroyed outright, so we need to think now about how cities will be designed again after that. I have seen with my own eyes the reconstruction in the areas hit by the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, and the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake, and my final judgment is that reconstruction led by government and large corporations is far too poor. It seemed to me that they were not looking at the place at all and were only filling it in with concrete. Japan's real problem in urban development, then, will come into focus when a city is destroyed by such an earthquake. This is a premise hard to imagine in other countries, but in Japan the future lies precisely in this repetition of the death and rebirth of the city. Our way of thinking about natural disasters also differs considerably from that of people in other countries.

When a huge earthquake forcibly resets the structure of a city, we will enter a stage in which we must begin "new city making" from zero, combining the wisdom of our ancestors with the most advanced technology, in answer to the fatal errors of urban development over the past hundred years. With this view in mind, I plan to share through Shitsurae my own ways of reading the cities and places of various regions. It is a sharing of wisdom for seeing places from a viewpoint that ordinary tourists to Japan could never reach, and at the same time it serves as risk management if you meet an earthquake during your stay. In discussions of security in East Asia, what is not yet fully taken into account is the structure by which the risk of a huge earthquake bears on Japan's national strength itself. If an earthquake strikes directly beneath Tokyo or the Nankai Trough megaquake occurs, estimates already put the chance of national fiscal collapse at one hundred percent. Since that risk is likely to materialize within the next thirty years, this natural condition must be placed at the base of any thinking about the dynamics of the region.

So for the future, this time we look at feng shui (風水), the view that has been at the root of Japanese city design since ancient times. The first condition for judging good feng shui is the idea of the "land in accord with the four guardian gods," shijin soo (四神相応). This feng shui first appears in writing in the Book of Documents (書経), one of the Four Books and Five Classics prized in China, and its practice is set down in the Yingzao Zhaijing (営造宅経). Roughly, the basics place flowing water to the east as the seiryu (青龍), the Blue Dragon; a long road to the west as the byakko (白虎), the White Tiger; a marsh to the south as the suzaku (朱雀), the Vermilion Bird; and hills to the north as the genbu (玄武), the Black Tortoise. What may confuse us today is that these directions are not the absolute east, west, south, and north of something like Google Maps. They are seen in relation to the main base of the city's design. The universal compass directions we ordinarily call to mind do not exist here. Feng shui holds that the directions themselves move from place to place. The way the four directions are understood therefore changes depending on whether the axis is the imperial palace in Heian-kyo, Osaka Castle, or Edo Castle. This is where people today are most confused in understanding the structure of Japanese cities. If you keep in a corner of your mind that the place is the starting point, understanding should come more easily. Choosing a site suited to the arrangement of the four guardian gods is the very root of making a city.

This way of thinking, which chooses a place by looking at the place and its climate as one whole environment, rests on the old wisdom of city making in ancient China. In ancient times the four gods are said to have been tied to constellations, and among them the one Japan has valued most is the seiryu. There are several interesting reasons. First, there is the old idea that Japan lay to the east when seen from the Chinese dynasties at the center. While this idea was growing at the base, after globes were brought in by Portuguese missionaries, an eye for seeing the shape of the archipelago as a whole was gradually trained, and people noticed that the shape of the archipelago itself resembles a dragon (龍).

Seeing the archipelago's shape as a dragon, people in time came to call Japan the "land ruled by the dragon god," ryujin (龍神). Indeed, ryujin worship in Japan is practiced countless times, large and small, and places that enshrine the dragon god exist across the country. The ryujin, however, is not a single dragon god. Broadly there are many kinds, white, blue, gold, and black dragons, among others, and the premise is that each has its own effect and function. The origin of dragon worship on the Japanese side goes back to the Yayoi period. Until the Jomon period the original form was not dragon worship but snake worship, and when the migrant group known as the Yayoi people brought dragon worship from the continent, it fused with the snake worship of the Jomon people. In the Chinese worship of the four gods, the blue dragon is tied to water, and the Yayoi people also held this custom: ritual tools in the shape of dragons were buried in wells and rivers. Not only the blue dragon but the countless ryujin enshrined throughout Japan carry a strong context of faith as gods of water, so ryujin worship flourishes especially along clear streams in the mountains. But the ryujin is not limited to water and is also a god of wind, so it is important not to define it narrowly.

Fundamentally, the ryujin is tied to the worship of water because Japan was once a country blessed with abundant, pure water. Modernization and pollution erased ninety-nine percent of the clear streams, but countless rivers still run across the archipelago, and they were once worshipped as dragons. The ryujin brings blessings to people, and at times turns its action around and rages. This is symbolized in what Japan has called, since ancient times, the abaregawa (暴れ川), the raging river. A raging river is a river that floods. It appears even in myth and may be called the main source of suffering for the Japanese since long ago. It was seen as "the dragon raging." Since a flood from a raging river was the same as the dragon raging, rites were held to calm the furious dragon. Calming the dragon is called ryuchin (龍鎮), and in the mountains of Nara Prefecture, which I visit often, traces of this faith remain. Myth suggests that the rites to calm the dragon involved human sacrifice up to a certain time in antiquity.

In this way, among the four guardian gods, Japan has valued the blue dragon from its own environmental standpoint, and this is a localized Japanese character. When feng shui chooses a city, one first finds a promising place and then looks at the surrounding terrain and the form of the mountain ranges. A winding mountain range is seen as a dragon vein, ryumyaku (龍脈). When it is seen this way, the hollows and plateaus scattered between the ridges are taken as "holes" (穴, ketsu) and called dragon holes, ryuketsu (龍穴). The dragon hole was thought to store the flow of qi as nourishment, the place where people settle and a city where culture develops, so Japanese cities hold this dragon hole at their heart.

The wisdom of the "land in accord with the four guardian gods," which reads the energy of the earth and its flow, differs greatly between China, where feng shui began, and Japan, which imported and adapted it. Just as kampo, China's traditional wisdom of medicine, was Japanized and took on a quite different form, feng shui also differs. The difference arises because the place is different. This should not be seen as a difference between China and Japan as nations, but it is very important to be aware of the basic principle that it varies with place. People adapt their lives to place. China's land is vast, so choosing where to set the capital within it mattered most. China also lies on a continent, with the threat of attack from every side, so a land in accord with the four guardian gods also had to function as a capital fortress. And because the land is vast, there was also a premise that if you did not like a place you could simply move.

Compared with these circumstances in China, Japan has narrow land, is a country of mountains with complicated terrain, and has few basins suited to building a city. In choosing where to set a capital, it was difficult to adopt as it was what held in China, under feng shui conditions. What is interesting here is that Japanese feng shui was replaced by another word, chisui (治水). Chisui literally means "to govern water" (水を治める). The fundamental idea of Japanese city design contains the idea of governing water, and the enshrining of the ryujin, the god of water, there can be called a remnant of wisdom handed down continuously: that life is made by governing water.

In the great cities of Kanto and Kansai, the two major metropolitan areas today, skyscrapers catch the eye and one hardly feels this. Looked at calmly, however, they hold several great rivers, the raging rivers. Osaka in particular has the great Yodo and Yamato rivers, and Tokyo too is a city that struggled hardest to build its channels of water. Unlike in China, the precondition of Japanese feng shui is water, and the ryujin is still enshrined as its symbol. To put it another way, how humans live together with water and at times hold it back has always lain at the root as a matter of life and death for Japanese cities.