A Fallen Landmark and the Literary Imagination: The Ryounkaku in Modern Japanese Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the early decades of the twentieth century, Tokyo grew rapidly and underwent radical change as it transformed into a ”modern” city. In this paper, I would like to explore the characteristic qualities of Japanese Modernism and post-disaster mentality by focusing on the representations of the Ryounkaku (Palace Rising over the Clouds), Tokyo's first skyscraper, which was destroyed in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, in literary works. Built in the heart of Tokyo's entertainment district (the Ueno/Asakusa area), the Ryounkaku became an important landmark of the ”Civilization and Enlightenment,” and also fostered imaginations towards the mystery genre among writers. After the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, the eastern downtown area of Tokyo, one of the most damaged areas, was rebuilt, and Asakusa came back to life as a ”modern quarter.” However, a close examination of fiction written by Edogawa Rampo, Kawabata Yasunari and Kaneko Mitsuharu leads us to another point of view. In their descriptions of the (fallen) Ryounkaku, the narrator's gaze at the building serves as a mediator between the past and the future. These expressions reveal some aspects of the post-disaster mentality.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".