Kyoto has come to epitomize authentic Japanese historical culture and is one of the world's most well-known tourist destinations. Kyoto is now imagined as the place where Japanese tradition is preserved in contrast to modern cosmopolitan conglomerations like Tokyo and Osaka. Kyoto is also not perceived as a marginal historical town like Nara or Takayama. It seems to have found a third path between the destructive vitality of the modern age and the stifling restraints of backward-looking nostalgia. Many tourists come in search of the elegance of a former imperial age. They discover Golden and Silver Pavillions and a park with walled enclaves where emperors once resided. Numerous temples open to visitors also tell the tale of their founding legends, such as their historical support by some emperor or high-ranking court family. Kyoto indeed exudes antiquity. Little is made of the fact that in 1864 a fire devastated most of the town and what we see today as typical for Kyoto has largely been crafted since the Meiji Period. In short, Kyoto not only is a modern construction physically, but may even be so in the very way people have insisted on constructing Kyoto's antiquity. The contribution of this edited volume is to sketch the early modern to modern transition of Kyoto during the first decades of Meiji when it was in search of a distinctive identity and purpose in the emerging urban landscape of a modernizing state. In the Introduction, the editors give a comprehensive overview of Western scholarship on Kyoto and introduce the most important Japanese urban histories. They show how the overwhelming academic interest in the town has been focused on the times leading up to the Edo period, while few scholars so far have examined modern Kyoto.

In the first part of the book, three seminal scholars of Japanese religion and national ritual ask how Kyoto found its unique place as a site for performing the nation. If anything else, the Meiji Restoration should have benefitted the very location that had hosted the emperor around which the modern nation was to be built. With the imperial transfer to Tokyo, Kyoto became “a Meiji Restoration loser” in 1869. To add insult to injury the anti-Buddhist policies of the Meiji state in the 1870s expropriated temple wealth and destroyed many valuable religious assets around a town, which today is considered Japan's religious capital. Takagi Hiroshi shows how Kyoto could be resituated as the very repository of a useful imperial tradition despite the very absence of any physical imperial presence. This feat was accomplished by invoking European models of urban divisions of labor with some countries and regions having capitals of power and capitals of culture. In order to gain international respect and recognition Meiji leaders realized that it was necessary to emphasize what is special about Japan and its culture in order to be recognized as a distinct civilization in its own right. Kyoto's development catered to this very need of the central state and served as the cultural showcase for Japan's claim to national independence and political sovereignty. John Breen traces the revitalization of Kyoto's most important intangible assets or what some call its “soft power.” Today seasonal festivals are a standard fare of urban life in Japan but Kyoto's Gion festival is probably the one with the broadest name recognition. Breen explains the process by which festivals and pageants were revived or invented in line with the new purposes of Kyoto as an “ancient capital.” Tanigawa Yutaka engages the changing role of Buddhism in the urban landscape. First, he describes the traumatic and confusing process of the separation of Shinto from Buddhism leading to the destruction of religious items and structures. He shows the adaptation of Kyoto Buddhists and their organizations to the adverse environment in which they emphasized their role of educators of the population at large when Kyoto became a pioneer of public schooling. Later, Buddhists contributed to Kyoto as city of learning in their function of training future priests and in building schools of higher education in response to the perceived threat of Protestant missionaries and their support of Doshisha, one of Japan's oldest Christian universities. He also hints at the problem that repositioning Buddhism in the nation's service in the early Meiji period may have been a possible source for religious and intellectual ultranationalism in later decades.

Part two of Kyoto's Renaissance outlines the perennial urban issues of place-making and how the cityscape and its environment was shaped by multiple stake-holders. Nakagawa Osamu's overview of urban space reveals how the pre-Meiji city, after a short hiatus, grew beyond its binary division of the upper and lower town. Just like nineteenth-century towns in Europe, older barriers, quarter gates and the odoi moat, were taken away to permit greater mobility. Several large-scale housing spaces became parks and a few thoroughfares enlarged into veritable avenues. The basic rectangular urban grid in its classical Heian-kyō vision survived modern rearrangements but one does not see fundamental new visions of public or private space emerge. One of the key features of its early Meiji development may have been the very fact that urban administration remained fragmented among multiple actors at the central and local levels. Oversight of the city was left to the prefectural governors until 1889 when an independent municipality was established. The author stresses the influence of conservative landholders in setting property taxes as a way of restricting the power of local administration. One wonders, though, about the role of neighborhood associations (chōnaikai), which even today play more than merely a folkloristic role in the social management of urban affairs. Kobayashi Takehiro presents the turning point of the eleventh centenary celebration in inducing the reconstruction of a replica of the imperial palace as Heian Shrine with its own jidai matsuri procession invoking stages of Kyoto's imperial past. Maruyama Hiroshi historicizes one of the trademarks of the Kyoto's urban landscape, namely the mountain forests surrounding the town. What visitors may assume to be natural scenic beauty for the public good were spaces going through changing ownership and management. Religious institutions initially had a high share of their landholdings in forests but even after the takeover by multiple organs of the government, they were often entrusted with their care since the state lacked the funds to do so. Although the author discusses various rules and regulations regarding forests, I suspect that an inadvertent mixture of sacred and secular beliefs protected these traditional woodlands from economic exploitation or urban sprawl. Even today some of the forests of Kyoto are surprisingly inaccessible to the casual hiker.

The third part explores economic development and cultural changes in Meiji Kyoto. Takaku Reinosuke explains why Kyoto's Meiji industrialization was not defined by a cityscape of smoking chimneys. Reading the chapter one could even reach the conclusion that its failed industrialization was a blessing in disguise. More than other large-scale infrastructural projects, the canal to Lake Biwa absorbed government resources. Initially intended as an encouragement of transportation and in powering water wheels, its original goals quickly became obsolete. Trains became the favorite mode of transportation with the construction of Kyoto Station. Canal water, however, found alterative usage. The Keage power station generated electricity and powered Japan's first city trams. Okazaki, planned as an industrial town, turned into a suburban area full of villas with extensive gardens and parks benefiting from the waters of Lake Biwa. Kuniga Yumiko draws a portray of Nihonga painting schools as they redesigned inherited styles of vision under Western influences and in relation to the Tokyo interpretations of the modern. Yoshii Takao describes one of the areas of urban pride and identification, Kyō yaki, the quintessential “typical” pottery named after its town of origin. Much of its creation owns to potters crossing the boundaries of different crafts incorporating design skills from the textile industry and the latest European production technologies. Ever since the Meiji period, export income and foreign tastes played a significant part to sustain and transform local artisanship competing not only on price but also in search of distinctive qualities.

Kyoto's Renaissance is the first in-depth English-language history of late nineteenth century Kyoto. The volume speaks to readers interested in Meiji Japan, urban development and cultural history. One question the volume may have explored further is what were the costs of redeveloping Kyoto as “ancient capital” in the service of the modern nation? The book describes well the short-term benefits to the city at various levels but the long-term constraints of urban development strategies and the path dependencies these initiated remain unexamined. How did Kyoto deal with the disjuncture of modernity beyond its political, cultural, and religious elite? What changes were weaved into the social and economic fabric of daily life in town? As attractive as Kyoto is today to domestic and foreign tourists alike, it has also become very dependent on the tourism industry, as is acutely felt during restrictions imposed during the Coronavirus pandemic. Even before this 2020 rupture, Kyoto was the poorest of Japan's 20 major cities in terms of per capita income, trailing significantly behind Osaka, the merchant capital of the Kansai region. Evaluating Meiji history in hindsight does not do justice to the people at the time but if we also consider the alternative paths not taken and the disadvantages of the paths traveled in awareness of other urban histories, we will gain a more comprehensive understanding of the history of modern Kyoto.