Japanese Cities

12 Global Interdependence and Urban Restructuring in Japan

12 Global Interdependence and Urban Restructuring in Japan Richard Child Hill and Kuniko Fujita What, in the final analysis, is distinctive about Japanese urban development? What sorts of issues does Japan's urban trajectory pose for social theory and comparative research? In concluding, we highlight several arguments running through the contributions to this book. 1. Global interdependence. For over a century, Japanese urban development has been intimately intertwined with Japan's changing position in the world system. 2. Flexible production systems. The interplay between global forces and city development in Japan has been mediated by the capacity of the Japanese to reorganize their systems for producing goods and services flexibly in response to external political and economic imperatives. 3. The developmental state. A systematic governmental effort to steer economic development in close cooperation with private firms has been a critical ingredient in Japan's capacity to adjust locally to shifting global forces. 4. Conflicts and contradictions. The meshing of industry and government notwithstanding, urban development in Japan has also been driven by internal social conflicts and contradictions. The interplay between the global economy and locally organized production systems, state restructuring strategies, and urban social con280 GLOBAL INTERDEPENDENCE AND URBAN RESTRUCTURING flicts has produced a distinctive Japanese pattern of urban development that can be seen in the functioning of the nation's urban system as a whole, in the internal organization of metropolitan areas, in the nature of local restructuring and redevelopment efforts, and in the challenges now facing Japanese cities. GLOBAL-LoCAL INTERDEPENDENCE Three hundred years of peace under a closed, centralized, feudal regime fostered a well-developed city system during Japan's Edo era. But because feudal lords protected their revenue base by restricting trade, choice of occupation, and choice of residence, Edo Japan also constrained the urbanization process. The Edo era came to a close when Japan was forced to open her doors to world capitalism in the middle of the nineteenth century. Japanese urban development has been intertwined with Japan's changing position in the world system ever since. Reforms during the ensuing Meiji era stimulated city growth by transforming fiefs into prefectures and by lifting feudal restrictions on trade, occupation, and migration. To survive in international trade, resource -poor Japan had to import raw materials for the manufacture of goods and export finished products to pay for her imports. Japan experienced a remarkable growth in foreign trade between 1870 and 1920, mainly in silk and cotton textiles. 1 Foreign trade stimulated the expansion of port cities, like Kobe and Yokohama. Burgeoning cities provided labor and commodity markets for industrialization. And industrialization shifted the locus of urban growth from the nation's interior and coastal periphery to the Pacific Belt. The urbanizing effects of international trade intermingled with the urban system carved out during the feudal Edo era to produce a unique set of rank-size relations among Japanese cities. As depicted by Nakamura , Japan's system of cities corresponds neither to the classical rank-size rule nor to primacy or biprimacy patterns. Rather, Japan has two sets of twin cities-TokyolYokohama and Osaka/Kobe-with a third metropolis, Nagoya, located in the geographical middle between them. A fourth city, Kyoto, the nation's cultural capital, is nestled alongside Osaka and Kobe. The period of militarism and controlled war economy during the 1930s and early 1940s likewise reveals the impact of international relations on urban structure in Japan. As the role of military expenditures in Japan's economy increased, the connection between big business and the 281 Richard Child Hill and Kuniko Fujita central government grew tighter. Closer relations between corporations and government prompted economic activity to gravitate from Osaka, heretofore the center of commerce and industry, to Tokyo, the center of government. Japan's development as an "enterprise nation" during the highgrowth period of the 1950s and 1960s also received external stimulus. As detailed by Miyamoto, reforms instituted by the occupation forces-particularly the new postwar constitutional and human rights regime-freed up national energies and helped stimulate the exceptionally high rate of urbanization during the early postwar period. State support for big enterprises backed by strong government regulatory powers furthered the concentration of corporate headquarters in Tokyo and the relative economic decline of Osaka after the war. Global energy shocks in 1973 and 1979 and the steep appreciation of the yen brought on by the Plaza Accord among the G5 nations in 1985...