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Few books have changed the way I see cities Eastern or Western as much as Barrie Shelton\u2019s Learning from the <\/em>Japanese City<\/em>. Were I an urban-planning academic, I\u2019d want to write its counterpart for the Korean city myself. But until some urban-planning academic does take it upon themselves to write such a book, I actually recommend to those who arrive in and struggle to understand Seoul, or any less colossal Korean City, Shelton\u2019s original. As I spend more time in Korea \u2014 punctuated by visits to its neighbor across the water, where I happen to sit writing this very post \u2014 the exercise of spotting the differences between it and Japan has become an exercise of spotting their ever-rarer similarities.<\/p>\n
A great deal of work has gone into scrubbing away the imprint of the Japanese colonial rule, which lasted in Korea between 1910 and the end of the Second World War, including the demolition of structures built (no matter how well) during that time. Consequently, you don\u2019t see much architectural similarity between, say, Seoul and Tokyo, but you do see a fair extent of overall urban similarity, beginning with the feelings both cities provoke in first-time Western visitors. \u201cI was baffled, irritated and even intimidated by what I saw,\u201d writes Shelton of his own early exposure to Japanese urban environments. \u201cYet at the same time, I found myself energized, animated and indeed inspired by them. The effect was liberating and my intuition was quick to suggest that further exploration of their chaotic vitality might be extremely rewarding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tokyo and Seoul have long made this kind of unfavorable first impression, at least since, \u201cto the \u2018Enlightened\u2019 Western eye of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the cities appeared drab, featureless and insubstantial,\u201d and the observing Westerners, \u201calmost without exception, could not see beyond the flimsiness of the individual buildings and the collective monotony of the cities.\u201d Shelton even quotes the late nineteenth-century traveler Isabella Bird Bishop (about whose travels through Korea more in a later post) describing Tokyo as \u201c\u2018a city of \u201cmagnificent distances\u201d without magnificence\u2019 meaning that it was an amorphous amalgam of grey featureless patches in a seemingly endless urban landscape.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n