Japanese Cities

1 Japanese Cities in the World Economy

1 Japanese Cities in the World Economy Richard Child Hill and Kuniko Fujita Japan is the world's second most powerful economy and one of the most urbanized nations on earth. Yet the English-language urban literature has relatively little to say about cities in Japan. This omission seems all the more striking when one contemplates the intriguing questions Japanese urban development raises for social theory and comparative urban research. For example: 1. What role did the city play in Japan's transition from feudalism to capitalism? 2. How does the urban experience of Japan, a late but successful developer , compare to that of economically advanced Western capitalist nations, on the one hand, and dependent third-world countries, on the other, with respect to such widely discussed phenomena as urban primacy, overurbanization, and growth in informal urban economies ? 3. Japan's post-World War II rate of urbanization has been among the most rapid of any nation in the world. What have been the consequences for Japanese society? 4. Japan's remarkable postwar economic growth thrust Tokyo into world city status. What is the character of Tokyo as a world city and the nature of her relationship to the rest of Japan and the world economy? 5. Oil crises in the 1970s and appreciation of the yen in the 1980s placed extraordinary pressures on Japan's economy. How did the state 3 Richard Child Hill and Kuniko Fujita and the civil society respond to the threat of deindustrialization and the imperative for urban industrial restructuring? 6. Japan is the newest economic superpower and the first in the history of capitalism to be situated in Asia. What is the present and likely future impact of Japan's global economic power on urban development in other nations, particularly those along the western Pacific Rim, where Japan's influence is most immediate? The original essays gathered in this volume touch upon all of these questions and much more. We had several concerns in mind when we approached leading scholars on urban Japan for contributions to this collection. First, we wanted to convey the historical context for contemporary urban issues. All the essays, therefore, provide historical background for the questions they address, and one is explicitly devoted to the urbanization process in pre-World War II Japan. Second, we wanted to bring a range of city experiences into view. Essays in this collection encompass Japan's largest metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya), prototypical industrial cities (Kamaishi, Kitakyushu , Toyota City), high-technology satellite areas (Kanagawa), and smaller, more traditionally organized districts (Tsubame). Third, we wanted to explore the intersection between economic organization and the city and to analyze how industrial transformation has structured Japanese urban development. While the contributors to this collection differ in their theoretical perspectives, their essays all focus on these concerns. The essays also target the role played by government-central, prefectural , and local-in the restructuring of Japanese industrial and urban life. Of central concern is the extent to which Japan's urban and regional development policies have kept pace with, and indeed have influenced, changes in the nation's economy. The dynamic link between global relations and local activities is also a theme of this collection. Since the beginning of the Meiji era in the middle of the nineteenth century, Japanese cities have continuously adjusted to the changing position of Japan in the world system. Even so, as the essays here amply document, urban development in Japan has been shaped as much by social contradictions and conflicts as by the smooth functioning of "Japanese-style" corporatist relations between state and economy. 4 JAPANESE CITIES IN THE WORLD ECONOMY URBANIZATION IN JAPAN Urban Growth in Prewar Japan The formation of a well-developed system of cities during the feudal era conditioned the emergence of industrial capitalism in late-nineteenth-century Japan. According to Hachiro Nakamura, Japanese feudalism nurtured three types of city. Castle towns proliferated when commerce and trade grew up around fortifications during the long peace of the Edo era (1603-1868).1 Transportation centers developed at the crossroads of major trade routes, and three capital cities stood at the apex of the feudal urban system: Edo, the political capital (renamed Tokyo at the beginning of the Meiji era), Osaka, the commercial capital, and Kyoto, the sacred or cultural capital. While cities grew during the Edo era, urbanization was limited by feudal barriers to international trade and the...