Tokyo: After the Landscape Theory
By Emilia Wang
“Landscape theory” (fukeiron), as theorized in 1969 by film critic and anarchist Matsuda Masao, states that the landscape of modern Japan is banal in its sameness and that this homogeneity is a product of the state’s authoritarian structure. The center reproduces itself in the periphery to the point that any dichotomy is flattened; there is no more hometown, only a longing to understand the nation’s hometown: Tokyo.