A Study on the Representation of Culture in Urban Tokyo

• Main Authors: Chen Pei-Chun, 陳佩君
• Other Authors: Liou Chang-Huei
• Format: Others
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/mjz57t

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 日本研究所 === 93 === When it comes to overseas travel, Japan’s capital Tokyo has to be one of the most popular destinations. Even though Japan is a foreign country, Tokyo doesn’t seem to be an unfamiliar place to most Taiwanese people. Due to the abundance of Tokyo related news or Tokyo set programs on Taiwanese media, the input of information has created people’s understanding and imagination about Tokyo. However, how did the media portray the urban space of Tokyo? Does the portrayed image of Tokyo differ to the actual Tokyo city? Even within Japan, this problem still exists. Through the reproduction by media, their interpretation of Tokyo to the receiver of the information has been given a lot of other meanings, this can be called a kind of “representative culture”. For example, the Taiwanese “Nipponolic” affection towards Tokyo is mostly due to Japanese soap dramas, thus a “Tokyo with symbolic meaning” in reality may not exist but is commonly present in media space or in the mind of the people. The “Media” referred to here includes paintings, literatures, lyrics, travel guides and television programs etc. Even though the Tokyo portrayed by media may differ to the real Tokyo, the main focus of this paper is not to discuss what is real or what is fake, as what actually influences people is this so-called “Illusion”. Therefore, in order to discover the causes of this creation of impression, this paper includes two major directions; that is to analyze the “symbolic society” and culture occurrence that is actually taking place in the Tokyo urban space to understand the ingredient for forming the impression and through observing the Tokyo presented by media to identify parts with artificial influences and to discuss the process of city image building. At the same time, in an age of transforming into global media, in the phase of urban planning, the influence of public media to the improvement of city image is very significant. Although the influence includes lots of commercial consideration and artificial manipulation, in order to achieve excellence in promotion, how to use this resource to create city image to assist urban renewal and even to help preserving cultural assets, promoting tourism is an issue not to be neglected.