Yamanote and Shitamachi
[1][2] While citizens once considered it as consisting of Hongo, Kōjimachi, Koishikawa, Ushigome, Yotsuya, Akasaka, Aoyama and Azabu in the Bunkyō, Chiyoda, Shinjuku, and Minato wards,[1] in popular conception, the area extended westwards to include the Nakano, Suginami, and Meguro wards after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923.
[6] When the Tokugawa regime moved its seat of power to Edo, it granted most of the solid hilly regions to the military aristocracy and their families for residences, in part taking advantage of its cooler summer.
[4] Marshland around the mouths of the Sumida and Tone rivers, to the east of the castle, was filled in, with the flatlands that resulted becoming the area for merchants and craftsmen who supplied and worked for the aristocracy.
The pairing of Yamanote - Shitamachi is well attested in records of the spoken language as early as 1650, and from that time appears often in documents and books.
In Metropolis Magazine, translator and scholar Edward Seidensticker believes that the dividing line goes from Ginza to Shinjuku, and "north" and "south" are more accurate terms.
[7] Seidensticker also describes how the economic and cultural centers have moved from Ginza and Nihonbashi to Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Shibuya, and Shinagawa.
As a result, today's Yamanote extends, in the eyes of the young, even further than Shinjuku, Bunkyo and Minato, to Suginami, Setagaya, Nakano, and even to Kichijōji or Denen-chōfu.
Today the immediate area, due to its close proximity to a major transportation hub, retains high land value.
"[10] While the distinction has become "geographically fuzzy, or almost non-existent...it survives symbolically because it carries the historical meaning of class boundary, the samurai having been replaced by modern white collar commuters and professionals.
"[11] Generally speaking, the term Yamanote has a connotation of "distant and cold, if rich and trendy", whereas "Shitamachi people are deemed honest, forthright and reliable".
[2] It is characterized by a relative lack of regional inflections, by a well-developed set of honorifics (keigo), and by linguistic influences from Western Japan.
Shitamachi is associated with petty entrepreneurs,[8] restaurant owners, small shop-owners and workshops, while Yamanote suggests the business executive, and the office worker.
[17] Alongside the long drive for modernisation that had characterised Japan's post-restoration history, Shitamachi was marginalised for the larger part of the 20th century.
[8] Shitamachi culture is thus depicted as more authentic and traditional (while Yamanote Tokyo is the present and future),[8] and its valorisation has been described as a refuge from the rapid modernisation of the economic boom years.
[18] Popular television dramas, comedy and documentary now "rarefy an often idealised notion of the Edokko, with the same intensity and nostalgia afforded an endangered species".
