TOKYO
City on the Edge
by TODD CROWELL and STEPHANIE FORMAN MORIMURA
Hong Kong: Asia 2000, 2002, 228 pages, $19

reviewed by Lawrence Rogers

Tokyo: City on the Edge is a little book with a huge store of facts that are presented in a pleasantly readable fashion. It is a fun book for those who have been in and around Tokyo for years, but it is also useful for the serious tourist who wants to know what is so special about the Big Persimmon.

The book is divided into a prologue and eleven chapters, e.g., "Money," "People," "Style," that are thematically broad enough to allow free-roaming discussion. Todd Crowell and Stephanie Forman Morimura have done their homework. They are writers who have lived in Tokyo off and on for many years and have gone out and talked with people and spent a good deal of time poking around in the city. Crowell, for example, visited the National Earthquake Center to find out what researchers are doing to give credibility to the center's name. In a lighter, less portentous vein, he and Morimura take us to the top floors of the Takashimaya department store in Shinjuku where game maker Sega has something called "Joypolis," a place full of virtual reality whizbangs, a wild river ride, Jurassic Park Lost World, and other fantasy delights.

The chapter "Pretensions" has some good and bad things to say about the art world, or at least the merchandising end of it, which was apparently a vast sea of speculation during the recent boom times, when so much money was thrown at Western art that Japan's balance of payments was affected. The authors are also critical of many of the commercial buildings that went up during the Bubble years, which they see as examples of "rampant individualism," something the Japanese are not usually accused of.

In civil matters, one is heartened to read that the metropolitan government has plans to replace the ugly flood embankments along the Sumida River with stepped, landscaped terraces. Alas, we are told the project will not see completion for fifty years. More immediately, there is a new law on the municipal books that limits ownership of land to no more than fifty meters below ground, a law that facilitated construction on the Shinjuku-Nerima subway line.

Some very basic cultural information is trundled out, starting with proper procedure at the public bath: "The bather sits down on a wooden . . . stool," but the authors also go beyond the tourist basics to note social change, e. g., the rise of volunteerism and the decline of the inner city, where residences and mom-and-pop stores continue to give way to office buildings and population lessens by the day.

There is plenty of interesting minutiae for the collector. In a commuter rail car carrying people at 150 percent capacity, passengers can still read a newspaperthough shoulders are touchingwhereas at 250 percent capacity, "you can't move your arms or feet." And a group of citizens meets in the Hamamatsuchô station once a month to change the clothes on the statue of an otherwise nude boy, a replica of the Mannekin Pis figure in Brussels. In December, he wears a Santa Claus suit.

We are given a brief but fascinating look at some expat Americans, mostly high-flyers who join the American Club and rent those hideously expensive houses in Azabu, where a $9,000 per month rent is unexceptional. The authors have little to say about folks on modest budgets, but then people do not buy a book titled Tokyo to read about the tribulations of foreign students and humble teachers of English.

The authors don't ignore the nightlife, past or present. Readers who have been in Tokyo for a while are reminded of the curious and, we are told, ultimately innocent phenomenon of the disco Juliana's raised dancing platform, with its miniskirted Office Ladies, and the ogling men below it. And we read that the once trendy and pricey Roppongi has fallen on hard times as a cool scene, news that somehow satisfies.

Both authors express themselves with humor and brio. Morimura, for example, finds herself sharing a counter in a Shimbashi yakitori-ya with "three red-faced salarymen in their forties, ties loosened, tongues thickened."

A few complaints. Crowell and Morimura seem to have their facts right, but they give us few sources. If footnotes are considered too intrusive, surely a bibliography at the back of the book would not be. And a reader feasting on all the well-presented facts would not pale when confronted by an occasional macron.

Flat-out errors are few. The copy editor apparently couldn't decide whether a schoolgirl is a kogyaru or a kyogaru (it's the former), and the Mullion complex is in the Yûrakuchô district, not the Ginza. A few other slips suggest imprudent reliance on a spell-check program rather than a flesh-and-blood proofreader. The indexing is good, and useful maps are sprinkled throughout the book.

Finally, there is the jacket artwork, basically an unappealing photograph of a young woman's pouty faceor is she merely slack-jawed?obscured by oversized sunglasses and a fire-engine-red cap, which surely must be the current epitome of cool in Shibuya town. When I first laid hands on the book, I immediately discarded the jacket, only to find that the outside of the book is absolutely blank: no title, no author, no publisher given. But I quickly learned not to judge this fine little book by its cover.