A Soundscape of Urban Modernity: Voices and Din in 1874 Hanjōki

This article focuses on aural patterns retraceable in four hanjōki (chronicles of prosperity) published in 1874 that deal closely with urban everyday life and constitute a valuable record of life in post-Restoration Tokyo, when things seen and heard in the city began to be treated by writers as indexes of the country's modernization. Sound representation is a useful tool to investigate multiple layers of meaning within a text, and hanjōki are a perfect example of cultural critique applied to urban environments. Through comparison with the genre's archetype, Terakado Seiken's Edo hanjōki (An account of the prosperity of Edo; 1832–1836), I emphasize auditory elements that reveal the authors' attitudes toward urban life in the 1870s and the complex intertextual system that is an essential feature of the hanjōki corpus. This focus on previously neglected issues encourages alternative understandings of established concepts of disruption and continuity in the modernization process.