ABSTRACT
Introduction When Lisa Nakamura (2002) dubbed the city of Tokyo as the Western default setting for science fiction, she was signaling to the city’s intricate, multiple, and hidden cartographies. When we think about the cartographies of Tokyo, we tend to think about the electronic spaces of Akihabara or the intricacies of the city’s rail system. Behind the backdrop of Tokyo’s image as a futurist megacity is a complex urban environment that is renegotiating many issues to do with energy and sustainability especially after the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear plant disaster known as 3/11. One such cartography is that of water-underneath Tokyo’s twenty-first-century modernity evidenced through skyscrapers, neon signs, and mobile media is a plethora of rivers and streams. While at first the connection between twenty-first-century mobile media and the historical importance of water may seem abstract, it is through the marriage of these two modern and traditional features of Japanese culture that we can connect to Japanese environmentalism.
