Machi: Neighborhood and Small Town—The Foundation for Urban Transformation in Japan

The term machi, signifying both neighborhood and small town, is a key element for understanding Japanese urban form and city planning. After tracing the origins of the term, this article explores the historic and contemporary significance of the concept and its particular spatial and socioeconomic forms. The article then argues that the concept of machi influenced the ways in which Japanese planners picked up foreign concepts through the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth century, absorbing some ideas and rejecting others. Building on their perception of the city as composed of urban units that allowed for planning in patchwork patterns, leading Japanese planners carefully selected models—independently of international appreciation—making, for example, the book The New Town by the German planner Gottfried Feder a standard reference. The article concludes by arguing that foreign observers must understand the concept of machi to comprehend contemporary Japanese neighborhoods, city life, and urban forms

Frederick Rolfe’s Christmas cards: popular culture and the construction of queerness in late Victorian Britain

This article explores how the British writer and artist Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913) made use of images derived from popular visual culture to construct and express a queer identity that attempted to combine cultural, religious and sexual deviance. He made particular use of practices of bricolage of images and artefacts, as can be seen from both his photographs and novels. The Christmas cards that he posted into a scrapbook in the early 1880s can be analysed as evidencing his development of a particular form of queer aesthetic self-expression. This article argues that satires – one of these cards was a satire on clerical effeminacy – have increasingly been seen in a positive light as being implicated in the very practices of deviance that they appear to denounce. However, in relation to aestheticism such arguments may have been taken too far, because of the inherently anti-aesthetic drive of visual satire towards the grotesque. It is suggested that it was only in Rolfe’s final years, when he emerged from the quasi-ecclesiastical closet and developed an intense sex life in Venice, that he found a new confidence to depict himself in ways that were less reliant on stereotypes derived from popular culture and which relied on appropriation of the signs of manly normativity rather than on the suggestive juxtaposition of attributes of deviance