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3 T H E AG E O F T H E C I T Y In Japan, the interwar period (1918–37) constituted a time of intensive reflection on what it meant to be “modern.” At a moment of rapid urbanization, as expanding city populations remade the social and physical landscapes of their communities, the Japanese began to link modernity with the urban experience . Popular referents for the neologism modan—jazz music, bobbed hair, cafés, automobiles, and multistory buildings—all conveyed the sense that what characterized the “modern” was the novel phenomenology of city life. In an outpouring of commentary, urbanites invented new categories to describe the changes they were experiencing in their everyday life. This new consciousness of the modern tried to make sense of the ways that the economic growth of the teens and twenties dramatically altered urban modes of production and consumption. To chroniclers of the new age, transformation of their built environment into a futurescape of paved roads and electric streetlamps, the rise of “social problems” like labor strikes and unsightly slums, and a mass consumer culture linked to the baseball field and the movie palace, all stood out as defining modernity. The city, in short, assumed the face of “modern Japan.” How were ideas about modernity produced and circulated? What were their material and ideological effects? To answer these questions, this book looks at both the subjective consciousness and the social structures of “the modern.” Though humanities fields differ in their understanding of this term, historians tend to conceive of modernity as a tale of two revolutions: the political, social, cultural, and economic transformations that attended the advent of the nation-state, and the emergence of industrial capitalism. Introduction U R B A N I S M A N D JA PA N E S E M O D E R N 4 • C O N T E X T S The time line of these twin revolutions varied widely throughout the world, as did their particular form; for Japan, the forced opening of the country to the global market in 1853 and the overturning of the feudal regime in the Meiji Restoration of 1868 inaugurated a series of administrative reforms and social changes that ushered in modern times. In the initial phase of this process , industrial capitalism took root through a host of state policies designed to create a national economy capable of securing Japan’s independence from the threat of western imperialism. At this moment the nation occupied center stage in Japanese economic thinking, reflected in the popular endorsement of state policies to promote a “rich country, strong military” (fukoku kyōhei) and to “encourage production, promote industry” (shokusan kōgyo). Throughout the 1870s and 1880s state financial and technical assistance helped to direct private investments into textiles, shipping, and railroads— industries identified as critical to national economic security. The cumulative impact of these policies was to weave together economy and nation: capitalist development served national concerns. The preeminent symbols of “civilization” to emerge from these years were the emperor and the railroad.1 Associating the “new Japan” with constitutional monarchy and a national rail grid, such images created an iconography of nationalism for the modern age. But by the early decades of the twentieth century the logics that grounded the identification of modernity as a national project began to change. Ushering in a period of accelerated economic and social change, the economic boom of World War One broadened and deepened Japan’s industrial revolution. In the new wave of public and private investments triggered by the war boom, the focus of development expanded into regions and localities. Investments in communications infrastructure added a regional network to the national rail grid built up in the 1880s and 1890s. Factories making consumer products for a domestic market multiplied ; a thriving service sector began to anchor urban and regional economies . Prefectural and municipal governments encouraged regional economic development through industrial expositions, the promotion of the tourist industry, local branding, and a variety of other strategies. The cumulative impact of these initiatives amounted to a second phase in the industrial revolution , as provincial development became one of capitalism’s new frontiers. All this brought a new level of engagement with urban centers, which were at once the staging ground and the agents of much of this activity. Rapid expansion of factory production created regional labor markets, and these drew migrants from the surrounding countryside to work the new shop [18.218.172.249] Project MUSE...

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