A Short History of Tokyo by Jonathan Clements

Author:Jonathan Clements
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913368005
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Here you saw how Western civilisation had eaten into them. Every tenth man was attired in Europe clothes from hat to boots. It is a queer race. It can parody every type of humanity to be met in a large English town. Fat and prosperous merchant with mutton-chop whiskers; mild-eyed, long-haired professor of science, his clothes baggy about him; schoolboy in Eton jacket…. But when you come to speak to the imitation, behold it can only talk Japanese.

Like some baffled Victorian Mr Bean, Kipling blundered down the street, addressing ‘the most English-looking folk [he] saw’. Much to his surprise, although presumably not to anyone else’s, nobody he ran into understood him.

The Westernisation of Tokyo continued without waiting for Kipling’s approval. In 1900, the poet Masaoka Shiki summed up the speed of development with a poem that symbolised the crash of modernity into tradition:

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