Visualizing Postwar Tokyo, Part 2 - The University of Tokyo

The history of postwar Tokyo reveals an essential feature of the modern city, i.e. the city as a place of visualities. In postwar Tokyo, countless gazes fell upon others; gazes from and upon Americans and the Emperor, gazes going up skyscrapers or rushing aggressively through the cityscape, and gazes twining and wriggling among classes, genders, and ethnic groups in downtown Tokyo. In Part 2, we will focus on the geopolitics of these gazes in modern Tokyo. What kinds of gazes fell upon the war orphans, the poor, and the marginalized groups in Tokyo? How did students themselves, who represented the vast accumulation of knowledge in Tokyo, perform in front of these gazes? Moreover, how did cinema or television shows, as media for these gazes, implicate the whole city? In answering these questions, we will identify the geopolitics historically involved in the practice of “visualizing postwar Tokyo.”

What you'll learn

• The way of the dynamic exchange of gazes in postwar Tokyo from different perspectives
• How technologies for visualizing were developed and accepted by people in Tokyo
• The research on the poor and the margins of urban society with the sociological theories behind them
• The transformation of Tokyo as the city of students
• “Visualizing” in cities and “postwar” in Japan