ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to elaborate how Japanese writers and thinkers wrought novel aesthetic and critical vocabularies from the material, conceptual, and affective transformations of Japan’s cities. Introducing an intensive moment within a broader genealogy of literary urban discourses in Japan, it delineates the decisive onto-epistemological shifts in urban thought found in the works of such critics as Nakahira Takuma (1938-2015) and Taki K?ji (1928-2011). In so doing, the chapter illuminates the diversity of critical discourses that emerged across two decisive moments in the early and late 1970s in Japan. While these diverse vocabularies were in dialogue with contemporary Euro-American urban thinkers, the specificities of the resultant proliferation of urban vocabularies offer a crucial means to articulate a planetary understanding of the role of urban transformation in fostering novel methodical and analytical perspectives. This chapter provides a much-needed survey of the discursive pursuits of a critical way of “reading” the city in the context of Japan’s rapidly urbanizing environments.
