In 2012, I was invited to a conference in Shanghai:
Rethinking City and Identity 反思城市与身份认同 Institute of Arts and Humanities，Shanghai Jiao Tong University 上海交通大学 人文艺术研究院 Shanghai, 16-18 May ( Download Conference Program (1) - Copy)
Various academics and media people presented papers on the spirit of a particular city. I spoke on Tokyo, a city where I lived for ten years, before moving to my beloved Tochigi for another twelve years.
It was a lot of fun--and I loved meeting new friends and seeing Shanghai. I also realized how daunting and hard it is to give an academic paper at a conference. It was pretty humbling.
The good news was our papers were translated into Chinese and yesterday the book arrived in the mail. What a surprise!
Now, it is being published in a special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. It was peer-reviewed, where I received the following surprisingly generous comments. The paper can be downloaded below.
Download Tokyo city of fires and flowersTokyo:
This essay is brilliant. It teaches. It deserves praise for its rigorousness, grounded in a rich historical and philosophical situatedness. It helps newcomers to Tokyo make sense of the city. I would recommend publication after attending to the following suggestions.
This line (page 14?): “And, so because the city never seems to generate anything beyond the sum of its parts, people are both embedded in-- as well as defined by—the neighborhoods.” is troubling because it has an (analytic) metaphysical trap door that will lead to criticism. I’d delete it.
It could use an edit for punctuation and hyphenation (when fitting). The author might want to trim a bit because the paper is too long (only a suggestion that can be dismissed entirely).
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