Tokyo

Tokyo seems like an ultra modern--even postmodern--city with its inventive skyscrapers and digitized surfaces. But it is also a city where past present and future coexist--where backstreets both inspire science fiction and host wooden temples fox shrines and Buddhist statues that evoke past ages. In this addition to Oxford''s Cityscapes series Stephen Mansfield explores a city rich in diversity tracing its evolution from the founding of its massive stone citadel when it was known as Edo through the rise of a merchant class who transformed the town into a center for art to the emergence of modern Tokyo. Mansfield traces a city of print masters Kabuki theater novelists and great architecture which has overcome many disasters from the 1923 earthquake through the fire-bombings of World War II to the 1995 subway gas attacks.