From flowers to factories: a peregrination through changing landscapes on the edge of Tokyo

Abstract

The east bank of Tokyo's main river, the Sumida, was lined on its northern stretch at Mukōjima by an embankment and by a series of temples, shrines and gardens that had been in the Edo period and continued into the Meiji era to be a favoured place for escape from the city and its physical and social constraints. In 1889, a large textile mill was founded at the embankment's northern end, and in the years that followed the area was largely industrialised. This paper traces this process of industrialisation and its culmination in the death of the cherry trees that lined the embankment as a result of flood and fire. It uses a variety of accounts to examine this process of marginalisation of a cultural landscape. In so doing, it reflects on some of the contradictory impacts of the process of urban modernisation and highlights the construction of a new riverside park and promenade in Mukōjima that incorporated the contradictory but classically modernist impulse to preserve the old while showcasing the new.