The real Tokyo, as any denizen of the world's most populous metropolis knows, is found in the smallest of spaces. Japan's capital is not a city of grand arterial boulevards. Its lifeblood flows instead through tangles of narrow alleys, up the stairs of slim buildings and into tiny shops and cramped eateries.
生活在这个世界上人口最多的大都市里的人都知道，真正的东京藏在最细微处。日本首都东京的精髓并不在宽敞的林荫大道。相反，它的生命力流淌在错综复杂的狭窄小巷里，在狭小建筑的楼梯间，在小商店和街头巷尾的食肆里。
Take Nonbei Yokocho, or Drunkard's Alley, a charmingly defiant cluster of watering holes in the shadow of Shibuya railway station. The average size of the 38 establishments is just under five square metres, notes “Emergent Tokyo”, a new book by Jorge Almazán, an architect, and his colleagues at Keio University. They nominate Tokyo as a model of a liveable megacity and explore its workings—and in so doing show how perceptions of it have evolved.
以饮兵卫横丁为例，这条位于涩谷火车站附近的小巷遍布小酒馆，散发着桀骜不驯的迷人气息。建筑师豪尔赫·阿尔马桑和他在庆应大学的同事在新书《自然生长的东京》中提到，这38家居酒屋的平均面积不到5平方米。他们将东京称为宜居大都市的典范，并对其运作模式进行了探究，在此过程中也展示了人们对东京印象的演变。
For much of its modern history, it was “the world city that everyone loved to knock”, observes Paul Waley, author of several books on it. Tokyo did not conform to traditional notions, Western or Chinese, of how a city should look, feel and function. In place of neat street grids that signal order and authority, it had a patchwork of meandering neighbourhoods.
曾就东京写过几本书的保罗·韦利表示，在进入近代史的大部分时间里，东京是一个“人人都喜欢对它评头论足一番的世界都市”。东京不符合西方或中国的传统观念，即一个城市应该像什么样、给人什么感觉、具有哪些功能。在这里，你看不到标志着秩序和权威的整齐的街道网格，取而代之的是形形色色蜿蜒曲折的街区。
Disasters left little in the way of visible heritage. There is no overarching style or sense of monumentality. Visitors have often been baffled and underwhelmed: in the late 19th century Isabella Bird, a British traveller, dismissed Tokyo as “a city of ‘magnificent distances’ without magnificence”.
灾难几乎没有留下看得见的印记。它既没有整体风格，也没有宏伟雄壮之感。游客们常常觉得看不懂它又索然无味：19世纪晚期，英国旅行家伊莎贝拉·伯德曾将东京嗤之为“一座‘地域辽阔’却不宏伟的城市”。
Edo, as Tokyo was first known, grew only when the Tokugawa shoguns chose it as their seat of power after consolidating control of Japan at the start of the 17th century. Some areas expanded along Chinese-style grids and others according to the topography of the land. They interlocked with one another in a kind of calculated incoherence, much like “a patchwork quilt”, writes Timon Screech in “Tokyo Before Tokyo”, published in 2020.
东京最初被称作“江户”，直到17世纪初德川幕府巩固对日本的控制后选择这里作为权利中心，它才得以发展起来。东京的一些地区按照中式的网格布局扩展，另一些则依地势扩张。泰门·斯克雷奇在2020年出版的《东京之前的东京》中写道，各个区域之间交错扣连，不过呈现处某种有意为之的不相一致，很像“一条百家被”。
Though Kyoto remained home to the imperial family, and was thus the official capital, Edo soon became pre-eminent. By the early 1720s it had a million inhabitants and was the world's largest city. Culture flourished, despite the earthquakes and fires that periodically struck. After the Meiji restoration brought an end to the Tokugawa shogunate and opened Japan to the world in 1868, the emperor moved to Edo. It was renamed Tokyo—literally, “The Eastern Capital”.
虽然京都仍是皇室所在地，因此是官方首都，但江户很快就声名赫赫。到18世纪20年代初，江户已有百万居民，是世界上最大的城市。尽管不时发生地震和火灾，但文化依然蓬勃发展。1868年，明治维新终结了德川幕府的统治，日本对外开放，天皇迁居江户。江户改名为“东京”——字面意思是“东方之都”。
Industrialisation and Western influence began to transform it. Grand Haussmann-esque plans for reconstruction were discussed but never realised, not even after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 flattened the city.
工业化和西方的影响开始改造这座城市。人们讨论过宏伟的奥斯曼式的重建计划，但从未实现，即使在1923年关东大地震将这座城市夷为平地之后也是如此。
After the second world war, when American firebombing razed Tokyo again, planners tried to impose order, erecting hulking concrete expressways over the canals that had earned Edo comparisons to Venice. Yet the planners' reach was limited, and much of the rebuilding happened haphazardly, from the bottom up.
二战时美国的*烧弹燃**再次将东京夷为平地，战后的规划者想要建立秩序，在江户堪比威尼斯的运河上建立了庞大沉重的混凝土高速公路。但规划者所能触及的范围是有限的，大部分重建工作都是由下而上随意进行的。
As Tokyo thrived in the post-war era, so did interest in its past, producing a boom in so-called Edo-Tokyo Gaku, or Edo-Tokyo Studies. In “Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology”, a seminal book published in 1985, Jinnai Hidenobu, an urban historian, argued that the rhythms of the Edo era had endured, even if the individual buildings had vanished.
随着东京在战后的蓬勃发展，人们对它的过去也兴趣高涨，从而催生了所谓的“江户东京学”的兴盛。1985年出版的《东京:空间人类学》影响深远，其作者、城市历史学家金井秀信认为，即使个别建筑已经消失，江户时代错综变化的布局仍在延续。
“There was no clear logical system in Edo that would bring a variety of elements together into a single whole as in a European city,” he wrote. Rather, “like a mosaic or a kaleidoscope”, the metropolis “sparkled with myriad different images created by the particularity of individual locales, their terrain and their histories”.
他写道：“江户不像欧洲城市那样有一个清晰的逻辑系统，能将各种元素整合成一个整体，” 更确切地说，“就像马赛克或万花筒一样”， 这座大都市“五光十色，每一处都有因其地形和历史而来的特质，造就了无数熠熠生辉的各异形象。”