As a schoolgirl, I heard the story of the change of the city's name, in 1868, from Edo to Tokyo (which means "the eastern capital"). I learned that this change symbolized the beginning of a new time in Japan, called the Meiji Era, after the emperor then on the throne. I was taught that it was a natural consequence of the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and his "Black Ships" in Edo in 1853, ending more than 200 years of Japanese isolation. In the Meiji Era (1868-1912), Japanese society was transformed, as the country was moved from medieval backwardness into the modern industrial era. Poor Edo paid a heavy price; name represented the past, while Tokyo became the city of the Japanese future. Edo survives now in history books and old prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige and in words like Edokko. Nobody in old Edo or in the Tokyo of the Meiji Era could ever have imagined that a Japanese schoolgirl would hear this history and then go home to watch Clint Eastwood speaking dubbed Japanese on "Rawhide." Some of the old Edokko would have been amused, a few outraged; all of them certainly would have been curious.

My Tokyo

 By Fukiko Aoki Hamill 

I was born in Kanda-Jimbocho, a section of northeastern Tokyo associated with the traditional Shitamachi, or Low City, home to merchants and artisans, tradespeople and craftsmen, geishas and courtesans-the core of Tokyo culture. When other Japanese hear this, they smile and call me an Edokko - a descendant of the inhabitants of Edo, as Tokyo was called when it was a castle town in feudal times. The Edokko have been described as being "like fresh spring breezes propelling the traditional carp kites" (open and outspoken, with nothing to hide) and as "not being able to hold on to their money" (liberal and generous). Like descriptions of New Yorkers, none ever seems to fit; there are always exceptions.

SNAPSHOTS OF MEMORY

The Tokyo of my earliest memories exists in black and white, like old snapshots. When the Korean War broke out, in 1950, I was two years old, and Kanda-Jimbocho, like the rest of Japan, had not yet recovered from World War II. In the monochrome of memory, I see U.S. troops occupying buildings or driving jeeps or walking in pairs down our crowded streets. At the same time, Japan was undergoing its first deep immersion in American popular culture, with American movies in the theaters and American music on the radio. My mother remembers the way hungry Japanese children, their parents dead, their hands out, implored American servicemen, "Give me chocolate." And there were still empty lots filled with rubble from the wartime bombing.

By the time I started attending the Futaba Elementary School, life was getting better. Black-market dealers still stood on street corners. People who had lost their homes during the American bombing were still living in hastily constructed public housing. But most people were no longer struggling to get enough to eat. By the time I was in fourth grade, we had watched television and seen streets crowded with automobiles. The empty lots were almost all filled with new structures. The city remained poor, hardworking, austere, but we knew the worst was behind us.

Those old snapshots of memory are clear in my mind when I'm away and are part of what always draws me home. When I return to Tokyo I usually stay in the Hilltop Hotel, in the neighborhood called Surugadai, within walking distance of Kanda-Jimbocho. In the lobby I sometimes meet other Japanese writers, who stay here while finishing books or meeting with editors and publishers. Perhaps most important, from the Hilltop I can walk down a long, sloping avenue into the streets where I was born and grew up and where my father still has his publishing company.

AFTER MANY HAPPY RETURNS, AN EXPATRIATE ARGUES THAT NO CITY CHANGES MORE-OR LESS

None of them, however, would recognize much of their lost city in the Tokyo of the present. It's almost as difficult for people born a few decades back in this century. I've lived in New York for more than eight years and return to Tokyo at least twice a year. On every visit, the city where I was born and grew up seems to have receded a bit more, disappearing into the mists of history.

MY NEIGHBORHOOD

Kanda-Jimbocho is famous throughout Japan for its used-books stores. During the Meiji Era many such shops are established to serve the students at the nearby universities. Until recently, two-thirds of all secondhand bookstores in the entire country were said to be in this district; they carried stock in many foreign languages as well as Japanese. Shops still exist whose signs announce their specialties: Western books or medical texts, for example, ukiyo-e prints or computer guides, the literature of the Edo period or the fat Japanese comic books called manga.

But Kanda-Jimbocho is more than bookshops. On the side streets or wedged between the bookshops are dozens of intimate restaurants, serving delicious curries, soba (buck-wheat noodles), assorted cakes, and different kinds of coffees. Here too you can find stores selling a dazzling variety of stationery, pens, brushes, handmade paper, and art supplies. For those wearied by too much intellectual effort there are even some pachinko parlors, where students, professors, cartoonists, and novelists lose themselves in the intricacies of a uniquely Japanese version of pinball.

Time, alas, presses on without mercy, even in my beloved Kanda-Jimbocho. In the most important ways - spirit and a sense of community - my neighborhood survived the bombing, but it might not survive progress.

In some ways the changes in Kanda-Jimbocho reflect the transformation of all of Tokyo. The 1980s saw a frenzied rush to construct new buildings. Japan's economic triumph made billions of dollars available to speculators. Some buildings are quite handsome, designed by a generation of superb Japanese architects. Others are extravagant, even arrogant, towering shamelessly over ordinary dwellings. And for every new building that arrives, older buildings have vanished. After the war my father moved into a two-story wood-frame house in Kanda. I was born there. My father's publishing company was on one floor, and we lived on the other until I was three. In the late 1950s the house was torn down and replaced with a four-story concrete building to accommodate the expanding company. Last year the four-story building also came down, to be replaced by a new, nine-story building. It's a handsome structure, and my father's office is now on the top floor, looking out over Kanda-Jimbocho. But the two buildings that are gone live on in memory.

DESTRUCTION AND RENEWAL

 In my first hours back home, I sometimes feel like a stranger. And like most people faced with change, I suffer a sense of nostalgia for what has been lost, even for lost ugliness. I hear old New Yorkers aching for places and people that will never return. The same is true in Tokyo. Edward Seidensticker, of Columbia University, well known for his English translation of the 1,000-year-old Tale of Genji, understands this feeling. In the first volume of history of Tokyo, Law City, High City, he writes about the fine Edokko novelist Nagai Kafu (1879-1959): “Kafu was as elegist, mourning the death of Edo and lamenting the emergence of modern Tokyo.”

 Perhaps all writers who live in changing cities are elegists. In 1923 the Shitamachi was destroyed by the great earthquake, which, with magnitude of 8.3 degrees on the Richter scale, left more than 100,000 dead in Tokyo and neighboring Yokohama. Gigantic fires killed more people than the quake itself; most of the Low City – and some of the High – was reduced to rubble. Virtually all that remained of Edo was lost. Nagai Kafu made that lost city the center of his work, but as he wandered through the new Tokyo he couldn’t know that another great destruction was coming. No one could have imagined it.

Tokyo’s second leveling started on April 18, 1942. That day, the first air raid over Japan was led by a B-25 piloted by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle. The bombing terrified the people of Tokyo. Then it got even worse. The bomb fell throughout the war. But the greatest damage was suffered on March 9 and 10, 1945, when much of Tokyo was leveled in gigantic fire storm and between 70,000 and 80,000 people died. Among the many thousands of homes destroyed was that of Nagai Kafu, in Azabu. His entire library was destroyed, along with all the mementos of his lost Edo. He himself escaped.

Today’s Tokyo is a city built on top of the burned-out ruins of the two disasters. After 1945 the city was not, however, reconstructed according to a plan. I remember my father’s grumbling about the lost opportunity: “If the mayor of Tokyo at the time had only set up a decisive plan for rebuilding and provided for rational roads and highways, we wouldn’t have this situation you see today. The period tight after the war was the only chance we had to get the road right.” He often repeats the complaint when trapped in one of Tokyo’s notorious traffic jams.

Tokyo roads are truly a maze. There is probably no other city in the world where it is so difficult to find as address. Most often the best method is to make your way to the general vicinity and then ask a policeman in one of the small police stations, called koban. Sometimes even he doesn’t know. But the chaos has its advantage. Wandering the city, you can still find rows of traditional-style houses on Narrow alleys behind modern buildings – or a geisha house next door to high-rise apartments. This mix of East and West, old and new, keeps the city interesting, even to an Edokko.

Change can happen anywhere in Tokyo these days. Recently my husband and I were invited by his Japanese publisher to dine in a restaurant on the top of the Keio Plaza Hotel, in the Shinjuku area. On a good day, from the 45th floor one can look across to the distant outline of Tokyo Bay or gaze down upon the gardens and rooftops of various Shinjuku neighborhoods. On this evening the sky was cloudy, and I didn't expect to see the usual glitter of Tokyo. What I did see gave me a shock. Directly across from us was the new Tokyo city hall, which would be just right in an Arnold Schwarzenneger film about city life in some distant century. Two megalithic high-rise towers filled the view, their polished stone exteriors emitting an eerie glow. I wanted to laugh, and I felt an odd sense of awe.

In the mid-1960s, skyscrapers seemed daring. Nobody could have imagined the Tax Towers, as the city hall has come to be known, but here they were, completed in April 1991 at a cost of $1.3 billion, the centerpiece of the new Tokyo Municipal Complex. One is 48 stories high; the other, 34. Their powerful— some say brutal— postmodern lines are the creation of the great Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. Looking down, I wondered what had happened to all those people who lived in the humble houses that had been replaced. They too were now part of the past.

SEE THE PALACE

So, when friends say they are going to Tokyo and want to know what to see, I always urge them to check in to the Hilltop and then, equipped with sensible shoes and a good map, walk to the Imperial Palace, at the center of the city. This is the best symbol of the past against which a stranger can see the present more clearly. The massive castle, with its sloping, perfectly cut stone walls and huge gates, is encircled by moats. The path along the edge of the outer moat is a favorite for hundreds of Tokyo joggers.

 Since the palace is the residence of the emperor and his family, only a portion of the compound is open to the public. Like a New Yorker who has never visited the Statue of Liberty, I’ve never been to the part of that is open to visitors. I was brought up in a liberal household; my father had a decidedly negative opinion of the whole idea of the imperial system, so I never developed any particular affection or awe for the emperor. Still, even if the emperor evokes no feelings in me, the sight of the immense stone gates and the moats around the castle speaks to me in a special way and always tells me I’m home.