Intro to the World’s Largest City
A new book by provost and history professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer ’97 takes readers through four centuries of Tokyo’s history.
A few months into the Covid-19 pandemic, history professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer ’97 was spending her sabbatical at home instead of in Japan exploring archives as she had planned. She received an email from an editor at Cambridge University Press, asking if she’d be interested in writing a book about the history of Tokyo for a new series.
Intrigued, Siniawer began writing. She finished Tokyo just as she began a three-year term as Williams provost. The 288-page book, published in February 2025, has been called “a perfect companion for anyone exploring the city in person or from afar,” and “a beautifully written, briskly paced introduction to the world’s largest city.”
Siniawer continues to work on shorter articles about the early 1970s and says she looks forward to returning to the classroom after a second three-year term as provost, helping to steward the college’s fiscal resources. Meanwhile, Tokyo, her third book, continues to garner interest in hardcover, paperback and audio formats.
“Researching and writing the history of Tokyo was a way of being in the city when I couldn’t be there in person,” says Siniawer, who discussed the experience with Williams Magazine in the spring. “At a time when the world felt distant, it was a way of trying to reach and educate a broad audience about the history of Japan.”
How was the process of researching and writing this book different from those of your previous two, both published by Cornell University Press: Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960 (2008) and Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (2018)?
My earlier books came out of questions driven by my desire to know and understand aspects of modern Japanese history underexplored by other historians. They developed out of years of archival research, continuously refining the questions I was asking, crafting and honing my arguments, and clarifying how my work was advancing knowledge of my field.
This new book depends largely on the research of other scholars that I’ve woven together into a historical narrative. It’s the first book in English, written by a historian of Japan, that tells the long history of the city. I tried to write it in a way that knits my historical analyses and interpretations into an engaging narrative arc for curious readers who may have little prior knowledge of Japanese history.
I was attuned to setting the scene, trying to evoke an image of the city at a particular time in a reader’s mind, and to developing historical characters as multi-dimensional people. Also, I did more to orient readers and explain context as well as convey the city’s complicated past without losing sight of the main threads of the historical narrative. This is a lot like teaching Williams students—how do you engage bright and curious people with little background knowledge of Japanese history in thinking about the complexities of the past? I wrote with my former students—and alums—in mind.
How did the project intersect with the research seminar you taught at the time, “The Many Lives of Tokyo”?
I inflicted drafts of book chapters on the students and asked them to engage critically with them as they would any assigned text and to offer feedback about how the manuscript could be improved. They responded with probing questions and thoughtful observations and helped me see what I was taking for granted. Because I’d only written a couple of chapters at that point, creating the syllabus and teaching the course crystallized for me the themes of the book, what would become the main narrative threads.
I also learned a lot from working with the students on their research papers. They researched and wrote about an amazing array of topics, from the history of timber to fashion, the railroad and cuisine.
Did you discover new aspects of Tokyo you hadn’t experienced in your travels or previous research projects?
I learned so much about what it might have felt like to live in Edo or Tokyo for different people in different circumstances at different times. About the raucous experience of going to the Kabuki theater in the early 1700s, or seeing a train for the first time in the late 1800s, or feeling the ground shake violently and rebuilding from the rubble of an earthquake in the 1920s. I also looked for details—the kind of thing that a resident of the city might have taken for granted at the time—that help bring historical experiences to life.
What do you hope readers will take away from your book—or from a visit to Tokyo?
I hope that the book will help visitors to Tokyo see the city through a more informed lens, that it will encourage readers to think about Japan in more sophisticated and nuanced ways, and that it will inspire readers to ask more questions and to want to learn more about the history of Japan.