Japanese Identities Book Review

I was recently browsing the bookshelves of the Eberhard Zeidler Library, my favourite place at Daniels UofT, when I came across Japanese Identities by Yuichiro Edagawa. Flipping past the cover, it is a book of some magnificent buildings in Japan. Most of them are historic but all identify strongly as Japanese.

The book wasn’t very informative and largely felt like postcards of places with only a short text and a photo or two. The preface regards the book as love letters to Japan.

What caught my attention was a map on the inside cover that indexed the location of each building. This made me really excited and I decided to reproduce this map as I was curious as to how many of these significant buildings I’ve been to.

Of the 76 buildings in Japanese Identities, I’ve been to 31. There were several in Kyoto and Nara that I wasn’t sure I’d been to so I may have been to more than I think but they’re probably worth revisiting anyways.

I can understand how difficult it would be to select 76 buildings for this book and under what criteria as a place like Kyoto could be an entire book in itself. It’s difficult to be selective of what is or isn’t included and there are other buildings, both modern and past, which I felt could have been included in this book but weren’t. Conversely, the majority of the book is focused on traditional architecture and historic buildings so the Sendai Mediatheque and Yoyogi National Gymnasium felt out of place — to an extend. I was also surprised that there wasn’t anything from Kyushu.

Japanese Identities was a short but enjoyable read solely to reminisces about my time in Japan and to feed my hunger to return .