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WORK TITLE: Tokyo: A Biography
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: Japan
NATIONALITY:
http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1215/2011279075-b.html *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and photojournalist. Japan Times, book reviewer. Contributor to the South China Morning Post and the Japan Journal.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Stephen Mansfield is an English writer and photojournalist who has lived and worked in Japan for more than a decade. He is a book reviewer for the Japan Times and a contributor to the South China Morning Post and the Japan Journal. Discussing his adopted homeland in an online Metropolis interview, Mansfield stated: “I think it’s a good place to cut your teeth on a new enterprise, and it was a great place for me to do an apprenticeship. Before I came to Japan, I had done a little photography in Beirut, but I didn’t have that much experience. I like the fact that Japan is the kind of place where you can turn your dreams, ideas and interests into something professional.”
Japanese Stone Gardens
Mansfield’s first book, Guide to Philippines, was released by Globe Pequot Press in 1997, and it was followed the same year by Culture Shock! Laos. Three years later, Mansfield authored Lao Hill Tribes: Traditions and Patterns of Existence. Since then, Mansfield has written the 2001 volume The Bradt Travel Guide: China, Yunnan Province and the 2009 title Japanese Stone Gardens: Origins, Meaning, Form. The latter work offers a tour of fifteen famous Japanese stone gardens. The author explains that rocks in Japanese culture are viewed as living things, meant for clearing energy and attracting good spirits. Stone gardens were developed with this ancient belief in mind, and Mansfield offers a comprehensive history of the practice. The volume includes photographs by the author, and it also includes discussion of the ways in which Shintoism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism have shaped the design of stone gardens. From there, Mansfield comments on dry landscaping techniques, as well as various applications for mixing stone, sand, and gravel within a Japanese stone garden.
Praising Japanese Stone Gardens in her Booklist assessment, Donna Seaman announced that the book “further deepens our appreciation for these landscapes . . . in a book as lovely and restorative as its subject.”
Japan's Master Gardens
Following the success of Japanese Stone Gardens, Mansfield wrote the 2009 book Tokyo: A Cultural History. Mansfield also released Laos with Marshall Cavendish Benchmark in 2009. Mansfield then returned to the topic of Japanese gardens with his 2011 volume Japan’s Master Gardens: Lessons in Space and Environment. With this title, Mansfield focuses on twenty-five master gardens throughout Japan. The book blends the author’s research, text, and photography, and it also covers the culture and history of Japanese gardens. Mansfield identifies several Japanese garden types (the healing garden, the modular garden, and the landscape garden), and he discusses the differences between them. The author then goes on to comment on the aesthetic styles that influence each garden type. Mansfield additionally writes about Japanese gardening techniques and common materials. In this manner, he covers everything from temple gardens to urban gardens. Japan’s Master Gardens is rounded out with extensive front matter and back matter, including a glossary, a timeline, and a bibliography.
Like its predecessor, Japan’s Master Gardens fared well with critics. A Publishers Weekly critic stated that the book offers “a wonderful balance of insight and visual delight.” Carol Haggas, writing in Booklist, was also impressed, finding that “Mansfield’s treatise succinctly defines the extraordinary variety and beauty of gardens throughout Japan.”
Tokyo
For his 2016 book Tokyo: A Biography: Disasters, Destruction and Renewal: The Story of an Indomitable City, Mansfield combines geography, social ethnography, social history, natural history, human history, and material culture to create a multifaceted portrait of Tokyo, Japan. Mansfield discusses the city from its birth to the present day, ostensibly profiling Tokyo as a complex organism. Indeed, he comments on Tokyo’s distinct background and evolution (almost as if the city possessed its own personality). Thus, the geographical placement of the city is as important as its governance. By discussing Tokyo through the lens of the titular biography, Mansfield offers a unique insight into an oft-discussed metropolis.
Commending the volume in the online San Francisco Book Review, Glenn Dallas announced: “Mansfield does an impressive job of loading the reader with details but never delving too deeply into any one period.” Julian Worrall, writing on the Japan Times Web site, was equally laudatory; he praised “the sympathetic attention given to the experiences of the poor, the dispossessed and the disenfranchised.” Worrall then concluded that “the Tokyo that emerges from this portrait is an urban society of tremendous resilience and, in spite of its orgies of destruction and frenzies of construction, an almost perversely irrepressible sustainability. An optimistic conclusion perhaps, at a time in which the city’s future prospects, under broader conditions of economic and demographic decline, are uncertain. Ultimately what this book shows is that we’ve been here before, again and again.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 1, 2009, Donna Seaman, review of Japanese Stone Gardens: Origins, Meaning, Forms; April 1, 2012, Carol Haggas, review of Japan’s Master Gardens: Lessons in Space and Environment.
Library Journal, January, 2010, Gayle A. Williamson, review of Japanese Stone Gardens.
Publishers Weekly, March 19, 2012, review of Japan’s Master Gardens.
Reference & Research Book News, October, 2012, review of Japan’s Master Gardens.
ONLINE
Japan Times, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/ (March 25, 2017), Julian Worrall, review of Tokyo: A Biography.
Metropolis, http://archive.metropolis.co.jp/ (May 9, 2017), Tracee Walker, author interview.
San Francisco Book Review, http://sanfranciscobookreview.com/ (May 9, 2017), Glenn Dallas, review of Tokyo: A Biography.*
Writer and photojournalist Stephen MansfieldÆs work has appeared in over 60 magazines, newspapers and journals worldwide, including South China Morning Post and The Japan Journal. He resides in Japan, where he is a regular book reviewer for The Japan Times.
LIFE IN JAPAN
Stephen Mansfield
Stephen MansfieldOccupation:
Photojournalist
Time in Japan:
Ten years
What do you do here?
Photojournalism is my main source of income, but I always like to have other projects in development. I' working on Laos Hill Tribes: Traditions and Patterns of Existence, which I am writing for Oxford University Press. The last book that I had published was Japan: Island of the Floating World, which is a photo book with a general introduction to Japanese culture and life. Also, NHK asked me to do an international news course in English that is an analysis and appreciation of world news for Japanese people who are fluent in English.
Where are you from?
I am from Oxford, England, but I have lived in various places. Before coming to Japan ten years ago, I lived in Barcelona, Cairo, and Beirut. Two years ago, I had to write three books, so I decided that it would be better to be stuck in a room in the countryside in the south of France. I just returned to Japan this January.
What do you like most about Japan?
I think it's a good place to cut your teeth on a new enterprise, and it was a great place for me to do an apprenticeship. Before I came to Japan, I had done a little photography in Beirut, but I didn't have that much experience. I like the fact that Japan is the kind of place where you can turn your dreams, ideas and interests into something professional.
What do you dislike most about Japan?
Extremes of behavior are sometimes difficult to handle. Like on the train sometimes people don't want to sit next to you but then other times they're happy to use your shoulder as a pillow. I think that the fine tuning of life in Japan is also difficult.
If you could take one thing back from Japan to your native country, what would it be?
When I eventually go back to the very gray country of England, I would strip Shibuya of all its neon and take it back as a remembrance of how energetic Tokyo can be, even during a recession.
You were here during the time of a booming economy, and now Japan is going through a severe economic crisis. How do you think the country has changed?
I think a recession is the most interesting time to live in Japan because everything is being questioned. People are becoming much more cynical about their leaders, authority, and the traditional male/ female classifications. During the bubble years, people were much more complaisant. They believed their system worked, so why should it be changed? Now there is more of a feeling that anything is possible, and Japan is more open-ended.
Do you have a favorite place to eat or drink in Tokyo?
I try to seek out the lesser known little back street places in certain areas such as Yanaka and Soshigaya. I like these areas because they take you back to the old Meiji and Taisho periods.
You have to spend the rest of your life trapped on the Yamanote line. You're allowed to take one book, one CD and one luxury item. What would they be?
Actually, it wouldn't be any hardship for me to be stuck on the Yamanote line. I really like it. I suggested a photo book on the Yamanote line to a publisher, but they were a bit shortsighted and didn’t go for the idea so the book would be Side Show by William Shawcross. For the CD I would take something meandering and ambient, like Brian Eno. The luxury item would be a bottle of St. Emilion Cheval Blanc, which was the only wine that I couldn’t afford when I lived in the south of France. Well, if I was trapped for life, the bottle wouldn't last that long so I think I would take a flamenco guitar for a source of income.
Stephen Mansfield spoke to Tracee Walker.
Stephen Mansfield is a British author and freelance photo-journalist based in Japan. His photo-journalism work has appeared in over 60 magazines, newspapers and journals worldwide. Subjects have included issues, travel, interviews, political coverage, cultural and literary themes. To date he has had sixteen books published. Laos: A Portrait was the first color photo book to be published on that country, and his Lao Hill Tribes: Traditions & Patterns of Existence, published by Oxford University Press, was the first full length work on the ethnography of Laos. His photos have appeared in several books, and been exhibited. After years of globetrotting his current work is focussed mainly on Japanese subjects. His next book, Tokyo A Biography, a critical history (Tuttle Publishing), will appear in October this year.
Australia's ABC Radio conducted an interview with Stephen Mansfield for their Saturday Extra program on December 10th (1:09:35) about his new book, 'Tokyo A Biography.' See the below link.
https://radio.abc.net.au/programitem/pel3MoR22L?play=true
Highly positive reviews of 'Tokyo A Biography' have appeared in the San Francisco Review and the Seattle Review. A full length feature review by Julian Worrall appeared in the March 26 edition of The Japan Times.
The author will be giving a talk at TAC (Tokyo American Club) in Tokyo on May 11th, at 7pm. Contact www.tokyoamericanclub.org (81 3 4588 0215) to find out more.
Japan's Master Gardens: Lessens in Space and Environment
Carol Haggas
Booklist. 108.15 (Apr. 1, 2012): p10.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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Japan's Master Gardens: Lessens in
Space and Environment.
By Stephen Mansfield.
Apr. 2012. 144p. illus. Tuttle, $24.95
(9784805311288). 712.0952.
It is probably impossible to view classical Japanese gardens and not feel a sense of tranquility. Valued for their refined simplicity and elegant composition, Japanese master gardens offer a timeless glimpse into ancient worlds and a timely antidote to the modern one. Japan-based photojournalist Mansfield is an authority on Japanese garden culture, and his photographic homage to that nation's finest examples of landscape design offers a suitably understated yet surprisingly comprehensive survey of the elements, materials, techniques, and principles that influence their creation. Within this slim volume, readers are introduced to stunning examples of healing and temple gardens, urban respites, and remote retreats. Mansfield's elegant photographs artfully capture each gardens essence, from the tightly controlled symmetry of dry landscape gardens of the temple at Sekizo-ji to the serene majesty of early seventeenth-century stroll gardens at Kumamoto. Teeming with historical, cultural, and design insights, Mansfield's treatise succinctly defines the extraordinary variety and beauty of gardens throughout Japan.--Carol Haggas
Haggas, Carol
Japan's Master Gardens: Lessons in Space and Environment
Publishers Weekly. 259.12 (Mar. 19, 2012): p81.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Japan's Master Gardens: Lessons in Space and Environment Stephen Mansfield. Turtle, $24.95 (144p) ISBN 978-4-8053-1128-8
In this generously illustrated book, author and photojournalist Mansfield (Japanese Stone Gardens) explores the beauty and history of Japanese gardens. Mansfield is an expert guide who uses poetic prose and photographs to examine the Japanese senses of nature and space, and the culture's fundamental gardening genres: the modular garden, the landscape garden, and the healing garden. The visual tour of 25 master gardens allows the reader to appreciate the exquisite details of each place, while also discerning the fundamental aesthetic principles that underlie the Japanese garden. Mansfield accompanies his striking photographs with a spare text that combines history, poetry, and thoughtful meditations on each space. It's a wonderful balance of insight and visual delight. The guide is completed with a glossary, historic timeline, and bibliography. Color photographs throughout. (Apr.)
Mansfield, Stephen. Japanese Stone Gardens: Origins, Meaning, Form
Gayle A. Williamson
Library Journal. 135.1 (Jan. 2010): p108.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Mansfield, Stephen. Japanese Stone Gardens: Origins, Meaning, Form. Tuttle. 2009. c.160p. illus. bibliog. index. ISBN 978-4-8053-1056-4. $24.95. INTERIOR DESIGN
Mansfield (Tokyo: A Cultural History) covers the history of stone gardens, their relationship to Japanese culture, and their design aesthetics with color photographs. In addition, 15 notable gardens located throughout Japan are toured.
By Gayle A. Williamson, Fashion Inst. of Design and Merchandising, Los Angeles
Williamson, Gayle A.
Japanese Stone Gardens: Origins, Meaning, Forms
Donna Seaman
Booklist. 106.5 (Nov. 1, 2009): p17.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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Japanese Stone Gardens: Origins, Meaning, Forms.
By Stephen Mansfield.
2009. 160p. illus. Tuttle, $24.95 (9784805310564). 712.09.
The term stone garden may sound like an oxymoron, but in Japan, for time out of mind, people have sensed that stones are charged with life. Considered "seats of the gods," stones were placed in "purified" clearings that became the prototypes for Japan's elegant dry-landscape gardens with their astonishing raked sand patterns. British-born, Japan-residing Mansfield, a versatile writer and photographer and Japanese garden expert, presents an illuminating history of this living art form in sharply focused text and image. He traces the influences of Shintoism, Taoism, and, most significantly, Zen Buddhism, and artfully delineates the aesthetics of stone, sand, and gravel arranged to embrace and transcend nature, embody impermanence and stillness, and inspire contemplation and serenity. By creating a vivid social context for the evolution of stone gardens over the centuries and portraying seminal master gardeners, Mansfield vitalizes this seemingly austere tradition. An in-depth tour of 15 masterpiece stone gardens ancient and contemporary throughout Japan further deepens our appreciation for these landscapes of aesthetic precision and meditative repose in a book as lovely and restorative as its subject.--Donna Seaman
Seaman, Donna
Japan's master gardens; lessons in space and environment
Reference & Research Book News. 27.5 (Oct. 2012):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
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9784805311288
Japan's master gardens; lessons in space and environment.
Mansfield, Stephen.
Tuttle Publishing
2011
144 pages
$24.95
Hardcover
SB458
Although the tranquility of Japanese gardens is threatened by theirpopularity, they still offer models of environmental enhancement.Mansfield (Japanese Stone Gardens), a freelancephotojournalist who designed his own home garden in Japan,showcases ancient to contemporary master gardens whoseaesthetic qualities convey a conception of nature that promotes ahealthy emotional and spiritual life. The beautifully-illustratedbook includes details on each garden's type, period, location,designer/commissioner; a map; glossary; bibliography; and list ofJapan's historical periods.
([c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
‘Tokyo: A Biography’: Tracing the life of a city
BY JULIAN WORRALL
SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES
MAR 25, 2017 ARTICLE HISTORY PRINT SHARE
Cities are intrinsically inviting subjects for a writer. Part human, part natural; arena of history and mantelpiece of memory — cities provide the setting for the archetypal encounter of the individual with the masses.
Tokyo: A Biography, by Stephen Mansfield.
208 pages
TUTTLE, Nonfiction.
With its conjunction of vast and intimate scales, its turbulent history and ever-shifting landscapes, Tokyo offers an inviting subject for the urban portraitist. In “Tokyo: A Biography,” Stephen Mansfield, a prolific author, photojournalist and longtime British resident of Tokyo, is the latest author to take on this challenge. With it, he joins a long line of illustrious interpreters whose readings of the city are available in English, including Edward Seidensticker, Donald Ritchie, Paul Waley, Ai Maeda and Hidenobu Jinnai.
The range of approaches to writing the city is as varied as the city itself, including social history, natural and human geography, social ethnography, and studies in visual and material culture. The term “biography” in the title, explicitly borrowed from Peter Ackroyd’s book on London, is a clue to Mansfield’s approach. The guiding premise is the city as a person, with its own background, narrative trajectory and psychology, whose story develops out of the interaction of internal propensities and environmental factors. The interpreter’s aim is to marshal the materials to deliver an understanding of a collective persona, to imbue the urban machine with its animating ghost: a human soul.
Evoking Edward Gibbon’s classic account of Rome, Mansfield presents his purpose as “Recounting the human footprint on time … to write a history that would include everything of significance and interesting insignificance,” an account that aims to be a “riposte to the perception of Tokyoites as involuntary cells or charged particles streaming through the body of the city.”
The book is structured as a conventional history, with chapters covering distinct periods arranged chronologically, noting that for Tokyo, “So great is the intensity of change that the city seems completely severed from its own history.” A bibliography and, usefully, a filmography are supplied.
Mansfield’s account is securely grounded in historical scholarship, but he wears his learning lightly. Techniques used in Japanese historical research, such as giving attention to place names in the stead of more enduring material evidence are seamlessly incorporated. Unfortunately, despite having incorporated several pages of color illustrations, there are no maps to help identify places or orient the discussion, nor reproductions of artworks discussed in the text. Luckily, Google can generally supply the supporting resources.
One of the pleasures of the book is Mansfield’s prose, which draws on his considerable poetic skill to deliver memorable formulations. Tokyo is “a massive jellyfish of cement and light,” while Edo, the old name for Tokyo, was a “bodacious, pullulating city.” Mansfield’s imagination is particularly tuned for the senses. The acoustic landscape of Edo is evoked with “the lap of the ferryman’s oars … and the stirring of air under the wings of riverside cranes.” Snippets of poetry and historical quotes judiciously selected from contemporary writers add color and insight to the historical sketches.
Trying to compress 400 years of urban history into 200 pages means that descriptions must be brief and analysis schematic. At times the account can feel like Arnold J. Toynbee’s apocryphal “one damned thing after another.” Nonetheless, the text generally balances illustrative description, telling anecdote and broader discussion of social and cultural change.
Interesting characters and details abound. Fascinating personas emerge from the shadowy back streets, such as Henry Black, the improbable Australian “blue-eyed rakugo” performer of Meiji-era Tokyo. A landscape of lost objects and occupations emerges with lovingly compiled inventories of the sakariba (flourishing places) and hirokoji (open spaces) of Edo.
This is a history experienced at street level, through the eyes and ears of Tokyo’s inhabitants.
Also refreshing is the sympathetic attention given to the experiences of the poor, the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, in counterpoint to the stories of the powerful and the famous. The situation of women figures as a prominent thread. We learn of the lower-class Edo women of the Fukagawa pleasure-quarters, whose fate was to be dumped over the walls of the temples wrapped in reed mats for burial in unmarked graves. We also encounter the impassioned energies of feminist reformers such as Raicho Hiratsuka in late-Meiji Tokyo who, with her literary magazine Seito (Blue Stocking), sharply questioned the roles traditionally assigned to women.
The inevitability of disaster, whether natural or man-made, is the basso ostinato in any history of Tokyo. The accounts here of quakes, floods, fires and war dutifully recount the litany of death and destruction that is numbingly familiar to any student of this city’s history. Yet after each terrible erasure, the city springs back anew with a primal vigor, often transformed in physical form with architectures that evolve with each successive wave from wood to brick to concrete and glass.
The Tokyo that emerges from this portrait is an urban society of tremendous resilience and, in spite of its orgies of destruction and frenzies of construction, an almost perversely irrepressible sustainability. An optimistic conclusion perhaps, at a time in which the city’s future prospects, under broader conditions of economic and demographic decline, are uncertain. Ultimately what this book shows is that we’ve been here before, again and again.
Tokyo: A Biography: Disasters, Destruction and Renewal: The Story of an Indomitable City
We rated this book:
$15.95
It’s easy to forget that cities are living, breathing creatures, constantly growing and evolving as buildings rise and fall, technologies advance, and populations shift. Tokyo has experienced more ups and downs than most cities, so it’s only appropriate that a metropolis so steeped in change should get a proper history, journeying from its earliest days to its current eclectic form.
Tokyo: A Biography is a curious way to look at a city, traveling from its shogunate infancy through the growing pains of a fiery adolescence and onto its later years as it strives to find itself and build an identity, both hampered by the choices of the past and influenced by the ever-changing circumstances of the present. Tokyo, like a phoenix, has burnt to the ground and resurrected itself, becoming part of the very fabric of the Japanese culture.
Mansfield does an impressive job of loading the reader with details but never delving too deep into any one period. Tokyo’s history could easily fill a volume twice this size, but Mansfield makes it feel complete, exploring not only how the city changed and grew, but why, and how it responded to various crises and obstacles. Tokyo: A Biography brings the city to life.
Reviewed By: Glenn Dallas
Author: Stephen Mansfield
Star Count: 3.5/5
Format: Trade
Page Count: 208 pages
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Publish Date: 2016-Oct-25
ISBN: 9784805313299
Amazon: Buy this Book
Issue: March 2017
Category: History