Japanese Cities

11 Reshaping Western Pacific Rim Cities EXPORTING JAPANESE PLANNING IDEAS

11 Reshaping Western Pacific Rim Cities EXPORTING JAPANESE PLANNING IDEAS Peter T. Rimmer The British were not great builders in the Roman or the Spanish kind. ... That was not their way. Their Colosseum was only the station racecourse, their Pantheon the modest Anglican Cathedral, and the palaces oftheir proconsuls were, by and large, hardly more than their comfortable gentlemen's residences. But the profusion oftheir buildings was unexampled. The architects of the British Empire, often amateurs, really did alter the face of the earth: never in history had one people distributed its constructions so lavishly, or stamped its taste so ineluctably across the continents. -Jan Morris, The Spectacle of Empire During my first visit to Japan in 1979, a professor of economics at one of the former imperial universities much admired the urban legacy of the British in Asia. He fretted that Japanese planners had made no lasting contribution to the geographical organization, patterns of urbanization, and physical and spatial character of overseas cities. In hindsight, his thoughts were premature. As part of a link between the urbanization process and global economic forces, Japanese planners have begun to make their mark on the development of cities, the spatial organization of society, and the built environment, particularly within the western Pacific Rim. This area of increasing Japanese economic activity-exports, imports, joint ventures, foreign direct investment, and technology transfer-stretches from Korea in an arc 257 Peter T. Rimmer through China and southeast Asia to Australia and New Zealand. New urban forms are being created, some existing built environments are being transformed, and others discarded as artifacts of a superseded colonial era. Although the link between cities and global economic forces is regarded as a contemporary phenomenon, the urban forms and processes of western Pacific Rim cities reflect successive waves of European imperialism since 1500-Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and Britishand , to a lesser degree, of colonizers-Germany, Japan, and the United States of America. According to King (1990a, b), the old empires had· to decay to free up flows of capital, goods, services, and labor that enabled the accoutrements of world cities to be grafted onto their colonial bases. Given the impending reorganization of the Pax Americana system on the western Pacific Rim, these new opportunities have given Japanese planners the opportunity of making a lasting contribution to the region's urban forms and built environment. In seeking the essence of a likely Japanese urban transplant, two basic issues need to be explored: How has urban planning developed in Japan since the Pacific war? And what elements have been exported to the western Pacific Rim? In addressing these issues two basic phases in Japan's postwar planning have to be examined: the period between the end of the Pacific World War and the first oil shock (1973-74), and the period after the first oil shock. During the first phase the country's planners were preoccupied with rehabilitating and developing Japanese cities to serve an economy dominated by heavy metal and chemical industries. Comprehensive transport and land use planning was a key element in these endeavors. Subsequently, these "eye-on-the-future exercises" were packaged for export to southeast Asia. While these methods were being implanted in southeast Asian cities, planners within Japan turned to the creation of an information economy based on computerized communications during the second phase of postwar development. This new technology underpinned Japan's plans for advanced cities in the twenty-first century. Then plans were formed for prepackaging and transplanting the new designer cities to overseas locations. Although southeast Asia was targeted initially, the scope of Japan's postmodernization plans has widened to encompass the entire western Pacific Rim. Japanese cities during the first phase of Japanese postwar planning provided role models for southeast Asian cities in the 1970s and 1980s. POSTWAR URBAN PLANNING IN JAPAN (1945-73) Once Japan had shrugged off the constraints of the United States occupation in 1960, her planners were 258 RESHAPING WESTERN PACIFIC RIM CITIES able to draw upon their prewar experience in former colonies, particularly Manchukuo, and pursue a policy of high-speed growth based on the heavy metal and chemical industries. As the major metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya experienced congestion, physical planners tried to guide manufacturing into a series of growth poles established as new industrial cities and special areas in the initial National Comprehensive Development Plan (1962) and as industrial complexes...