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37 One of the most striking effects of Japan’s modernization project of the late nineteenth century was the rising prominence and increasing centrality of Tokyo within the new national space. By the 1920s, Meiji government policies of national developmentalism pursued since the 1870s had built Tokyo up and transformed it into the control room for nationwide political parties, the seat of national government and apex of administrative hierarchies, the clearinghouse for the financial industry, the heart of the national transportation grid, a locus of industry and a major concentration of population, and the main portal to the outside world. These policies increased Tokyo’s centrality in cultural ways as well, as it became a center of higher education, the high arts, the publishing industry, and the mass media. In a material sense, these economic, political, and cultural institutions and networks concentrated power and resources in the capital, producing and reproducing its centrality. But just as significant, people came to think of Tokyo as the first among cities: they believed it to be the largest, the best, the foremost, the fastest, the most advanced. And because nothing succeeds like success, this faith in Tokyo as number one augmented the capital’s capacity to attract still more economic, cultural, and political resources. In other words, belief in Tokyo as the center had a power-effect, which reinforced and reproduced its centrality. It is this combination of material and ideological forces that I highlight by the term Tokyo-centrism. Intellectuals, the literati in particular, stood at the heart of this process. Literary production in the early twentieth century was concerned, overwhelmingly, with everyday life. Because their depictions of life in the metropolis, in the provincial town, and in the rural village critically shaped urban and rural imaginaries, writers occupied a central role in the T W O The Ideology of the Metropolis 38 • G E O - P O W E R A N D U R B A N - C E N T R I S M production of Tokyo-centrism. Moreover, faith in Tokyo’s centrality was most fervently felt in high cultural circles. For writers, artists, and musicians, the metropolitan stage represented a singular pinnacle of achievement. Their fixation with Tokyo emerged from the intimate relationship between the literati and institutions of the press and the schools. Built up in the late nineteenth century as instruments of national integration, newspapers and the educational system created networks that connected urban communities , and they provided a conduit that channeled talent and ambition to the capital. In the process, they became important vehicles for the production and dissemination of Tokyo-centrism. More than any other, these two modernizing institutions gave definition to the literati as a social formation and cultural force. They offered a meeting ground and a stage, shaping the ethos of the literati and propelling them to social prominence and influence. Like the institutions that fostered them, the literati became instruments of Tokyo-centrism. Though Tokyo’s centrality owed something to the Tokugawa legacy of Edo-centrism, Tokyo’s rise was determined as much by what happened after the overthrow of the feudal regime in 1868 as before. Soon after the establishment of the new state, fierce competition broke out between two centers of the old regime for designation as the new national capital. Osaka, the economic hub of rice and money exchange, emerged as one contender, and Edo, the seat of shogunal political power, as the other. Edo, renamed Tokyo, or “Eastern capital,” won out, but even its new designation called attention to the contingent nature of capitals in Japan, where the physical seat of power had shifted frequently over the centuries.1 Old Edo bequeathed to new Tokyo its academies of samurai erudition, its shogunal palace and aristocratic estates, its vibrant popular culture, and its demographic dominance over other urban centers. Nevertheless, as Henry Smith points out, in the early years of the transition from Edo to Tokyo the new city became a shell of its former self, losing population as the feudal lords and their samurai retainers abandoned the city for their homelands, taking with them much of the wealth that had sustained the city as a center of consumption and cultural production since the 1600s.2 Two decades into the new era, Tokyo recovered the million population mark and regained its centralizing momentum through the establishment of a national railway grid, a constitutional government , and other policies of the Meiji developmental state. Though we have tended to...

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