Towards Street Oceanography: Ginza Street as a Case Study

Abstract

A companion paper proposes a field organised around the street understood as an open system: heterogeneous flows passing through a heterogeneous terrain, forced from outside on several timescales, altering what passes through and altered in turn. That proposal was made in the abstract, and a proposal for a field earns attention only where its questions have determinate content on an actual street and records adequate to answer them can be shown to exist. Supplying that demonstration is the role of this paper. The case is Ginza, in central Tokyo, chosen for three properties the proposal requires of a case: unlike regimes of price, provenance and use within a few hundred metres; a documented arrangement altering the traversable configuration reversibly and on a schedule; and an observational and institutional record reaching back a century and more. The paper sets out that record, reads the district as an ordered sequence of layers laid down since the seventeenth century, and works the field's principal questions through the case in turn. Four findings are claimed. An imposed terrain of the 1870s was documented as initially rejected by its occupants, which is a recorded instance of flow and terrain moving against one another. The interruptions in the record arrive with their causes separately documented, which is the condition under which an absent interval becomes usable evidence. A rule governing the street was made to track daylight, exhibiting an institutional reading that follows a forcing the institution leaves untouched. And the persistence most likely to impress an observer proves the evidence least able to discriminate, since the standing null account produces the same appearance. The paper closes by specifying a first campaign of measurement in four pieces, ordered by what each requires of the others.