The global historian Lisa Hellman reflects on the ‘Gender and the Global City’ session at the ESSHC 2018
Read More
Fig. 1: A page from the transcribed diary of Hosokawa Noriko (細川軌子), titled Umibe no Aki-iro (海辺秋色), written in 1782. As the wife of a daimyo lord from the Kumamoto region, she was one of the many women who passed by Edo in her travels. Source: National Institute of Japanese Literature.[http://base1.nijl.ac.jp/iview/Frame.jsp?DB_ID=G0003917KTM&C_CODE=0015-003005]
(Note: all Japanese author names featured below are written according to Japanese custom, with family name placed first, followed by their first name.)
One of the crucial aims of the Freedom of the Streets project is to investigate the ways in which women lived and navigated through the early modern cities of Amsterdam, Berlin and Edo, among others. As is widely known, textual materials written by men exist in abundance, so as we began to consult secondary literature and went through several documental materials in the various archives of Tokyo, our priority was obviously to locate textual materials written by women that talk about Edo in one form or another.
The first challenge was therefore to compile a preliminary list of such materials. It became clear while going through the secondary literature (especially that written for an English audience) that most of the essential academic work done on women's lives in the Edo period can be traced back to a small group of scholars gathered under the chairmanship of historian Shiba Keiko (柴佳子), forming a society known as Katsura no Kai (桂の会), and an archive called Katsura Bunko (桂文庫) [http://koki-bo.world.coocan.jp/edo_vrn.html]. This society was formed in 1990 and has devoted itself to searching and accumulating materials written by Japanese women from all over Japan during the Edo period. For a number of years, they published 15 issues of a journal titled Edo-ki Onna Kou (江戸期おんな考 which roughly means "Women's Thinking in the Edo Period"), and following this, they have switched their efforts into transcribing and publishing the materials they have accumulated so far on a number of books.
Their most recent opus is a large volume titled Edo-ki Onna Hyōgensha Jiten (江戸期おんな表現者事典or "Encyclopedia of Female Creatives in the Edo Period" in English), which gathers a list of 12000 women from all walks of life in early modern Japan whose personal writings or artistic works have survived to this day. Other notable works by this group include: an encyclopedia of female diaries in the Edo period (近世の女旅日記事典); a series of 3 volumes exploring women's thinking in the Edo period, and the way they were portrayed by male historians during the course of time (江戸期ひと文庫); and two series of critical editions of early modern female writings respectively known as Kinsei Jōsei Sōsho (近世女性双書) and Edo-ki Onna Shiryō-shū (江戸期おんな史料集). The only work of Shiba Keiko available in English language is Literary Creations on the Road: Women's Travel Diaries in Early Modern Japan (2012).
Another scholar who has devoted his time to the study of Japanese women in the Edo period is Maeda Yoshi (前田淑): from him we have two compilations of travel diaries respectively titled, Edo Jidai Joryū Bungaku-shi - Chihō wo Chūshin ni - Tabi Nikki-hen (江戸時代女流文芸史―地方を中心に―旅日記編), and Kinsei Onnabito no Tabinikki-shū (近世女人の旅日記集).
From other authors, we should mention an annotated collection of early modern female literature works edited by Furuya Tomoyoshi (Edo Jidai Joryū Bungaku Zenshū, 江戸時代女流文学全集); and three detailed studies about gender history in Edo, namely by: Kurushima Noriko et al. (歴史を読み替えるジェンダーから見た日本史, Rekishi wo Yomikaeru Jendā kara mita Nihon-shi); Hayashi Reiko et al. (日本の近世15: 女性の近世, Edo no Kinsei 15: Josei no Kinsei); and Yabuta Yutaka et al. ("江戸"の人と身分4: 身分のなかの女性, Edo no Hito to Mibun 4: Mibun no Naka no Josei)
But having checked all of these extensive scholarly works, the problem remained that we needed a more concise list of materials that described Edo, a task which, to the best of our knowledge, no one has tackled until now. So by referring to the aforementioned works, we have compiled a preliminary list of about 60 manuscript materials written by Japanese women in the early modern period that at least in part mention Edo. Most of these are travel diaries, but it would be incorrect to say that all of these travels were made for leisure: we see women who are forced to either travel to Edo or leave Edo, in function of their husbands having died, or reassigned to a new region (ex: Yokoyama Keiko、露の朝顔); others travelled in hopes of receiving training from masters in the poetic and literary arts, a venture which was considerably more difficult for women than men (ex: Tagami Kikusha-ni, 手折菊 / ふたゝび杖); others travelled to receive medical treatment in hot spring bathing facilities (ex: Ohzuki Tahoko, 更衣日記) and we even have the case of a woman who was arrested and put in a prison in Edo for about 7 months (Kurosawa Toki, 上京日記 / 京都捕れの文). Their writings were not always intended for public diffusion, but were meant rather to memorialize their experiences going through unfamiliar lands.
A good portion of our list obviously originated from the hard work of Shiba Keiko, who has already accumulated more than 160 travel diaries from women all over Japan (see近世女性の旅日記から―旅する女性の姿を追って―, Kinsei Josei no Tabi Nikki kara – Tabi suru josei no sugata wo otte). But her list was originally published in 1991, and when attempting to verify or corroborate the location of the documents, we found that some of them have either been moved into other archives, or have become untraceable (especially in the cases of a handful of documents that were in the possession of private family archives). So we still have quite some work to do before we can effectively access all of these documents, not to mention the considerable challenges that involve decoding people's handwriting in the early modern period; fortunately, close to half of them have been made available in annotated editions, which have been transcribed into modern-day Japanese characters, and are therefore much more approachable by scholars.
However, even in the case of the annotated editions, another serious issue comes to the fore: judging from the handful of diaries that we have been able to check in this short period (and also from our talks with Japanese scholars), they contain very little information about Edo. For the most part, their references to Edo do not exceed a few simple and concise sentences that merely mention their passage through some lodging town such as Yotsuya or Shinagawa, or simply describe some people that they saw when they were arriving at each place. But having admitted that this textual information is much more limited when compared to the more detailed diaries left by Japanese men, we do often see that these women wrote a couple of verses of waka poetry associated with each place. This in itself is a fascinating aspect, as they were not necessarily interested in describing the dry reality of what they were seeing, but used their trip as an opportunity to flex their creative muscles and recall their early upbringing, in which the learning of classics of Chinese and Japanese poetry played an important role. They did not always create new poems, but sometimes would cite one of the classic poems that they learned in their childhood. So, even though these materials might not contain a lot of mappable information, they still showcase their unique perspective on the urban space of Edo and its scenery.
It is beyond the scope of this post to present the full list of the materials we have gathered so far, but there are a couple of noteworthy diaries which deserve a brief mention for being especially detailed and rich in information. First off, we have the writings of Kuroda Tosako (黒田土佐子), namely Ishihara-ki and Koto no Hagusa (石原記, 言の葉草). Tosako was the wife of a daimyo lord stationed in Edo. After becoming a widow, she managed her husband's estate and left the aforementioned two diaries, one written in the mid-18th century and another during 2 or three years in the 1730s. She mostly travelled around the districts located northeast, east, southeast and south of the Edo castle, and usually hanged out with other daimyo wives at their homes, or did street walks with her sons and daughters (who were mostly grownups by the time she writes the diaries). She generally left the house every 2 to 4 days, and inserted poetry and fragments of popular literature within the diaries. Finally, she mentions the dates of fires in the city as well as other important incidents.
Secondly, we can mention the diary of Inoue Tsūjo (井上通女), named Edo Nikki (江戸日記). Tsūjo originally came from the Shikoku region to Edo in the second half of the 17th century to serve as a teacher for the children of a feudal lord stationed in the metropolis. Her diary includes the general weather conditions for the period of 1862-63; she lists a number of interesting things that she saw on her walks, such as flowers or folding screens; there are also mentions of official names of some of the lords that she meets with in Edo, although she is not very detailed in this aspect; finally, she frequently lists names of temples that she visits around Edo, and the text is full of waka and kanshi poetry. Her interest in temples is mirrored by many other Japanese women of the time: a frequent reason for their travels involves pilgrimages to temples not just inside Edo, but across Japan, even if some of those sacred sites were off-limits to women (on the account of Shintoist/Buddhist purity laws, which saw female menstruation and childbirth as forms of pollution), in which case they would stay merely at some building near the entrance, having some tea. Praying for a successful childbirth, health and longevity, or for the peaceful afterlife of their deceased husbands and ancestors, were some of the reasons that led them to embark in these journeys.
The diaries of these two women clearly show that movement throughout Edo was an inescapable aspect of their daily lives. They were certainly not confined to the precincts of their homes, but leaving the city itself was admittedly more challenging, due to governmental impositions on the movement of women across Japan: since the early Edo period, wives of daimyo lords were forced to remain in the city as hostages while their husbands returned to their provinces, to discourage them from any thoughts of plotting rebellions or conspiracies. This led to strict controls of women entering and leaving Edo, but as Laura Nenzi argues in her work Excursions in Identity - Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan (2008), this did not always discourage them from seeking ways to evade such controls. While Nenzi's work is devoted to depicting human travel across Japan, and is not strictly focused on Edo itself, it does provide very interesting outlooks on how the most famous places of Edo were portrayed and perceived by its inhabitants, and is recommended reading for anyone who is interested in the topic of Japanese travel diaries.
For those who wish to get a closer look at the diary of Kuroda Tosako and her trips across Edo, there is an excellent study in English by Marcia Yonemoto ("Outside the inner quarters: sociability, mobility and narration in early Edo-period women's diaries" in Japan Forum, Vol. 21 (3), 2010, 389-401), who also looks at a diary by a relative of Tosako named Nakayama Suzuko. Her travel diary is named Fujii-shi Onna no Ki (藤井氏女記), which unfortunately follows the patterns of most of the diaries that we have encountered so far, by making only very brief and concise references to Edo. Due to the narrow length of Suzuko's diary, Yonemoto resorted to Tosako's writings in order to reconstruct the later life of Suzuko, and it appears that she did move residences frequently, and may have had just as much freedom of movement within the boundaries of Edo as Tosako or Tsūjo.
To conclude, it is painfully clear that women are considerably under-represented in historical sources, but we still see them pop up in memos written down in male diaries, such as the one by Saito Gesshin (斎藤月岑日記, Saito Gesshin Nikki). For the most part, they consist of short meetings, possibly to discuss issues related to the neighborhood's daily management, or perhaps just for courtesy. There is even less information about women of low castes, which are sometimes mentioned in legal documents. Overcoming these limitations and showcasing the voices of these women in a balanced manner will be one of the most important challenges of our research project going forward.
Together with the Global History Collaborative and Linking Cloth-Clothing Globally (LCCG), the Freedom of the Streets project organized the international conference “Gender, Space and City in Global History” at the University of Tokyo in the weekend of 28 and 29 October 2017. Through twelve research presentations in five panels on a wide range of topics, speakers from the US, the UK, France, Taiwan, the Netherlands and Japan investigated how a global history of gender, space and urban life can be possible.
It was an interesting challenge to link and compare historical research on topics ranging from the Italian Renaissance palace to the role of landladies in Shanghai during the Republic of China. Of course, the panel themes provided guidance. The papers in the ‘consumption, space and gender’ panel (Dr. Ling-Lin Lien and Yuko Nakamura) showed us the spatial politics around saleswomen in department stores. The panel on property (Dr. Claudia Damasceno Fonseca and Dr. Sun Huei-min) showed us issues of gender and space around (non-)ownership and how space and buildings were utilized through renting and shop keeping, in places as different as early modern Brazil and modern China. The panel on everyday use of space (prof. Sandra Cavallo and Genki Takahashi) consisted of two papers on two fascinating opposites: the marginalized hinin from the Edo period and their huts and family life were followed by a paper on elite Renaissance Roman palaces. But the common theme of contrasting built environment with the social reality of these two opposites of their respective social hierarchies provided food for thought and opportunity for comparison.
Furthermore, the panel on global connections (prof. Toru Miura, Dr. Khohchahar E. Chuluu and prof. Jeremy Prestholdt) brought together different approaches. It was very interesting to hear one paper on space as an issue of global mental geographies and two papers on gendered space as grounded in practices and regulations in Islamic cities, Mongolia and Japan. Finally, (although actually the first panel of the workshop) our project presented itself in a panel, where Antonia Weiss presented an outline of her new research project launch of her research on 18th century urban nature in Amsterdam and Berlin, Bob Pierik presented on the methodology and initial findings of his research on gendered use of urban space in Amsterdam, and Dr. Bébio Amaro returned to his PhD dissertation with new questions and approaches as he considered the role of gender in religious spaces in Nagasaki in the 16th and 17th centuries.
In the final discussion, we debated how these different histories were connected through a host of common themes and approaches. We found that similar themes ran throughout many of the papers, such as the role of the scale of the urban environment or the difference between permissible spaces (characterized by opportunity) and suspect spaces (characterized by restriction). We discussed whether or not such themes could serve as framework for a global history. This way, a global history can be written of places that are not as explicitly linked as in other approaches to global history that focus on explicit global connections, such as the core-periphery relation between the colonizer’s metropolis and the colonial city (just to name an example). It may be interesting to consider such broad themes that come up in research on gender and urban space as metahistorical: they appear all over the world, although in different forms and locally situated contexts. This helps us go beyond grand narratives of modernity that debates of gender and urban space so often resist being fit into. They provide us with a framework for comparison that we may perhaps use as a new approach to global history.
This fruitful debate had to be shortened slightly because we were reminded of the realities of urban life in Tokyo: A typhoon would soon reach the campus of the University of Tokyo. All participants could safely find their accommodations.
The last day, our project had the great opportunity to meet with members of the Takeshi Ito Laboratory (Ito Lab) at the Graduate School of Engineering of the University of Tokyo for a joint study meeting. The Ito Lab is a group at the Department of Architecture headed by Prof. Takeshi Ito that focuses on Urban-Architectural history. It was very interesting to speak to a group of researchers with a different background who were working on related issues. In general, our project looks at social relations and one question is how the built environment influenced those, while the Ito Lab researchers look at the built environment, and one of their main questions is how this influenced social relations.
Besides being an opportunity for sharing our project to an international audience, it was our new project member Bébio Amaro’s chance to present his plans for research on Edo (early modern Tokyo) to a group that had experience with the Edo sources and could constructively think with us. Ito Lab PhD candidate Hiroki Kominami presented his research on the evolution of the Edo Temple-Parish system during the late Edo and Meiji periods. He showed how temple parishes came to determine important administrative boundaries.
We had a very interesting discussion about Amsterdam and Edo and the similarities and differences of the source materials that we can use to study both. The sources are very different in terms of both the type of sources and the details that can be distilled from them. Nevertheless, we discussed ways that similar information on everyday life could be distilled from what is available to us, which will surely help our project forward in the coming months.
This blog by Bob Pierik was previously published on the Gender and Work blog earlier this month.
In March 1710, ordinary life at the Amsterdam Botermarkt was disrupted when Grietje Veenendael, who had a market stand with stockings, was attacked by another market woman. The two women had a dispute over the location of their market stands after which Lena (last name unknown) pulled Grietje backwards and threw her on the ground. Lena’s two daughters and the husband of one of them joined the fight and kicked Grietje brutally.
After the violence, when Grietje had fled to the chief officer to make a statement, people gossiped in the market that a man had attacked Grietje. Perhaps this happened because of the presence of Lena’s son-in-law. Nevertheless, one of Lena’s daughters then returned to the scene to dispel those rumors. She told bystanders ‘while beating her chest’ that ‘it was no man who did that, but me and my mother.’[1]
In my research, I am trying to get a sense of embodied practices of gendered use of urban space. The above is a case that I was able to reconstruct through witness statements drawn up by the secretary of the Chief Officer, who was also sworn in as notary. It is a conflict arising over the claiming and using of space in an area with large numbers of women present. The witnesses that reported the story of Grietje’s assault were all women, the only man present in the narrative was Lena’s son-in-law, which is remarkable compared to similar cases. It shows the textile market as an urban space dominated by women.
Furthermore, the source gives us a sense of the rumors that spread about the presumed gender identity of the attacker and there is the theatrical claiming of the violence by a woman, as a woman. Was she protecting her husband, who may perhaps have been prosecuted more harshly for attacking a woman than the daughter and mother? Or was she claiming the violence proudly as her own, as victor in a conflict over ownership of the streets?
Such cases containing very explicit gendered discourses and performances directly relating to the question of ‘who owns the street?’ are very insightful, but also somewhat rare. If we take the general narrative of this type of source as the main prism through which to look at the streets of Amsterdam, we get an image of streets dominated by men who engage in constant (knife) violence against each other. Women feature, but mostly as victims or witness. Besides some exceptionally informative conflicts that are explicitly about restriction or permission of someone’s presence, many violent conflicts are itself less revealing about ‘ownership of the streets’ and its more subtle negotiations.
However, we can leave the actual crimes to historians of crime and pay less attention to the conflicts that were the reason for the document to be drawn up. Rather, in the project that my research is part of, we want to look at the activities that were taken on by those individuals reported in the document. This allows us to reconstruct a snapshot of the situation before the disruptive event. By moving the conflict to the background, the background of the conflict moves to the forefront. This, the ‘pre-crime scene’, then forms my ‘field work’ for what I suggest can be called a form of historical urban ethnography. In many cases involving the Amsterdam notary archives, it is possible to reconstruct scenes in which we find all the persons mentioned in the attestation, before the ‘normal’ situation was disrupted and they were transformed into witnesses, perpetrators and victims.
From the perspective of the history of work, this approach is inspired by the ‘verb-oriented method’ developed by the Gender and Work Project Group at Uppsala University, which focuses on descriptions of practices of work rather than occupational titles.[2] From the perspective of cultural history, it is inspired by historians of the body that have called for a closer focus on practices in the form of a ‘praxiography.’[3]Historians of the body and ethnographers have used this approach to move ‘beyond interpretations of the body to the actions of physical bodies in practice.’[4] In similar vein, such an approach can be used to move beyond interpretations of space as characterized statically (e.g. public/private, male/female) towards space as constituted in practice by its users.
Many events can be given a specific location, often at least on the level of street names, but also frequently with remarkably more exact details. This allows us to study the role of women and men moving through the streets, chatting in front of houses, peeking through windows and sitting in backyards, but of course also: working, selling, trading, and providing lodging. This reveals practices of women and men and their interactions and actions.
Example of the level of spatial detail: ‘At the same time, a woman called Sara who lives at number 10 in the widows’ almshouse, was standing on the doorstep of the aforementioned house. ’(Staande ten selver tijd op de stoep van het voorsz. Huijs een Vrouwsp: genaamt Saara woonende aen het weduwenhofje in N°:10.) Source: NL-AsdSAA, inv no. 8068, 433.
This is not just an issue of historical geography, but it is very relevant for debates on gender and work as well. Work is very important here, because a large part of the gendered ideologies and expectations around work is spatial in nature. With these sources, we have potentially extensive quantities of empirical material to test theories that assert that the early modern period saw a separation of (gendered) spheres, a divide between the workplace and the home, and whether or not a ‘cult of domesticity’ surfaced. Among others, I hope that this method can enable us to investigate the locational and embodied aspects of work, leisure and consumption.
[1]Amsterdam City Archive (NL-AsdSAA), Archief van de Notarissen ter Standplaats Amsterdam, inv no. 8068: Minuutacten Gerard van Esterwege, 101.
[2] Rosemarie Fiebranz et al., “Making Verbs Count: The Research Project ‘Gender and Work’ and Its Methodology,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 59, no. 3 (2011): 273–293, https://doi.org/10.1080/03585522.2011.617576.
[3] Iris Clever and Willemijn Ruberg, “Beyond Cultural History? The Material Turn, Praxiography, and Body History,” Humanities 3, no. 4 (October 9, 2014): 546–66, https://doi.org/10.3390/h3040546.
[4] Clever and Ruberg, 553.
As explained in our website, the Freedom of the Streets project consists of 4 main sub-projects: Edo, Amsterdam, Urban Nature and An Eurasian Perspective. Although the latter three have been in the works for some time, October marked the official kick-start point of the Edo project. So all of the team members flew to Tokyo to participate in two academic events, and also to collect research materials across a number of archives. But the first day was devoted to a short walk across the northeast and southwest parts of Tokyo, through which our team members were able to directly experience some of the topographical peculiarities of the city, and to discuss the changes between Edo and Tokyo while walking and enjoying the scenery.
In fact, we are far from the only ones interested in this kind of exploration. For a number of years, there has been a small trend among Tokyoites to engage in what we may call "historical experience walks". Armed with books that compare old maps and images of Edo with current maps, these history fans roam the streets of the city (especially during the early morning), stopping at historical landmarks and imagining the tales of successful (or failed) samurai rebellions, suicide pacts among lovers who could not overcome the social restrictions of their time, famous actors walking through beautiful gardens, or reimagining the former splendor of rivers that have been buried for decades and are now converted into busy roads as a result of the rapid post-war modernization process. There are even a few semi-famous programs on Japanese TV, in which actors or TV hosts leisurely walk across cities, parks and temples with a local guide, unraveling the fascinating stories that took place. Of these, my personal favorite is by far the program "Bura Tamori" by NHK Japan (and internationally on NHK World Premium), in which a widely-known TV and radio star known as Tamori walks through cities and natural parks all over Japan accompanied by historians and lecturers from various local universities, who one by one explain the urban evolution of each city, the roles of topography, geology, geography and culture in determining urban form, and the unique identities of each site. Please do check it out if you ever have the chance, and especially if you are passionate lovers of urban history.
But returning to our project, on October 27 the entire team was finally reunited in Tokyo, and despite the jet-lagged looks on their faces, we were able to walk around Ueno Park (especially the surroundings of the Shinobazu Pond), Bunkyo-ku (in which the campus of the University of Tokyo is located) and Roppongi (especially the Mori Tower district).
The Shinobazu Pond, located on the west side of the Ueno district, is an especially important site not just in Tokyo, but even during the Edo period, as it attracted crowds of urban dwellers coming to enjoy its flowers or appreciate its cherry blossom trees. This was originally a natural pond that was artificially expanded through the centuries, and even completely drained at one point. For most of the Edo period, Ueno and this pond were located close to the northeast limits of the city. It had a number of temples, of which the most picturesque is the Benten-dō temple (弁天堂) situated in a small island within the Shinobazu lake. For a long time, the only way to access the Benten island (which held the temple Kan'ei-ji during the Edo period) was by boat (later, a narrow passage in its east side was built), but currently a number of landfilled paths allow us to walk through the middle of the pond, and to appreciate its beauty from up-close (see the two maps below).
Left/Right: The Shinobazu Pond in its current situation (Sources: Google Maps / Wikipedia).
Left: Shinobazu Pond in the Meireki period map of Edo (明暦大江戸図), around 1655-1658.
Right: the same pond in a late Edo period map (御江戸大絵図) held by Kagoshima University Library.
This area is also notable because it marks the intermediate point between the very shallow deltas of the Sumida and Arakawa rivers in the east limit of Tokyo, and the hilly region of Bunkyo-ku. Nobility and prestigious families would usually locate themselves in the higher lands such as Bunkyo-ku, due to their safe location against tsunamis. On the other hand, the intermediate region of Ueno was mostly occupied by commoners and merchants, and as we reach the shallower lands near the river, we would see more and more people of lower status and with less resources, as well as fishermen settlements who needed to have quick access to the sea (In fact, the way in which topography influences the distribution of social classes can also be seen in other early modern cities such as Nagasaki, which had people of poorer status along the margins of the Nakashima River and richer people in the upper cape).
Topographical map of contemporary Tokyo, based on GIS data.
Even today, the area of Ueno is still marked in risk-management materials as a risk zone in the case of tsunamis. Even though it is now located about 2-3 km away from the Sumida River (because the city gradually landfilled more and more of its coastline), there is still a small possibility that in the case of a massive earthquake such as the one that victimized the Tohoku region in 2011, a large tsunami wave could conceivably reach inland as far as the foothill of the Bunkyo-ku area. So in the case of a tsunami warning, people would be advised to climb the Bunkyo-ku hill, or the small elevated area that is now known as the Ueno Park.
Having left Ueno, we took the Hibiya subway line to directly reach Roppongi station in the southwest part of Tokyo. After a brief walk around the area, we went up to the famous Mori Tower to experience its City View Sky Deck. It is the highest place in Tokyo where you can access the rooftop, without anything to block you from wind and rain. During days of bad weather, the Sky Deck is not accessible, but during a normal day the view is simply breathtaking. We arrived just in time to see the sunset, as it fell over the Japanese Alps region, not far from the world-famous Fuji Mountain. The time from late October onwards is especially good for viewing Mount Fuji from Tokyo, since during the morning and sunset times, moisture levels decrease considerably, and it becomes possible to see much further than during the spring and summer seasons.
And so, while enjoying the sunset, we studied the geographical boundaries of Edo from our excellent vantage point: we saw Atago hill near Shinagawa, which was a popular place from which to view the city of Edo; then on the West there was Shinjuku park, on the South the 30-year old landfilled entertainment district of Odaiba, which in the late Edo period was a group of isolated islands containing cannons and military fortifications; and in the East we saw all the way to Asakusa and Oshigome, where the Sky Tree, the tallest building in Japan, is located.
Finally, we went down to enjoy a sushi dinner in the Roppongi district, passing through the myriads of foreigners looking to enjoy its many dance clubs and pubs, and finally returned to our hotel for a well-deserved rest! Please stay tuned for future posts concerning our recent activities.
