Japanese Cities

4 The “New” Tokyo Story RESTRUCTURING SPACE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR PLACE IN A WORLD CITY

4 The "New" Tokyo Story RESTRUCTURING SPACE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR PLACE IN A WORLD CITY Mike Douglass The history of Tokyo has been one of cycles of meteoric expansion and radical restructuring. From its ascendence as Edo, the nation's center of military-political power in the early years of the seventeenth century, to the new era of internationalization in the late twentieth century, these cycles have radically altered Tokyo's social, economic, political, and physical structure. The unification of the country under the Tokugawa shogunate and the construction of Edo Castle beginning in 1603 initiated the first cycle of rapid expansion. Samurai, merchants, craftsmen, and a host of other new urbanites arrived in such great numbers that within a century Tokyo had grown from a small settlement into one of the only cities in the world to have more than 1 million inhabitants. 1 Over the next century, however, the population increased slowly as the demands of the ruling class became more onerous and feudal Japan entered a process of internal decline. The overthrow of the Tokugawa bakufu and the Meiji restoration in 1868 initiated another cycle of expansion propelled by the ascendence of a market economy and an industrial revolution. The samurai, who dominated the city and occupied as much as 40 percent of its land during the Tokugawa era, were swiftly replaced by a new class of bureaucrats and the beginnings of powerful factions of merchant and industrial capital. By 1920 Tokyo had surpassed the Osaka-Kyoto region as the most densely settled area of the country (Yazaki 1968, 419). The new 83 Mike Douglass and expanding urban proletariat packed into tenement houses in Shitamachi , the "low city," and in suburbs extending outward to the city's periphery. Further impelled by Japan's colonial adventures in Asia, this cycle was brought to a close by the end of World War II. The closing of World War II brought land and other major reforms that stimulated a new cycle of expansion and restructuring. 2 The subsequent advent of the "Japanese miracle" in the 1950s and 1960s brought the most pronounced population increases ever experienced by Tokyo. Between 1955 and 1965 the Tokyo metropolitan region increased from 15 to 21 million, adding an average of 600,000 people every year (Kuroda 1988). But by the late 1970s this tremendous cycle had also run its course; net migration rates fell dramatically, and so did land prices as industries and jobs began to move toward other regions along the Pacific Belt. The 1980s, however, were to bring a new cycle of urban restructuring of even larger proportions. Along with these socially produced transformations, natural forces have added their own persistent cadence to the reconstruction of Tokyo. Tokyo's location in a zone of frequent earthquakes and the city's past reliance on wood to build its houses and shops has subjected it to widespread conflagrations that left few buildings standing for more than a generation. It was almost completely destroyed twice in this century, in 1923 with the Great Kanto earthquake and then with the incendiary bombing in 1945. But instead of dampening the cycles of change in the city, these disastrous events accelerated the rate of expansion and restructuring . The Great Kanto earthquake, for example, presented unforeseen opportunities to consolidate land into larger holdings, which "brought up the business center around Marunouchi so rapidly that an entirely new 'landscape' of massive concrete buildings which had been unfamiliar to Japan till then appeared. Herein the mainstay of the economy settled" (ReJ 1957, 21). In such a milieu, gaining access to and maintaining a place-land, home, and a sense of community-has been a continuing struggle marked by periods of intense conflict. Faced with powerful and seemingly capricious forces of change, households have often sought ways to mobilize their resources collectively to cope with and even resist intrusions that threaten them. As reflected in one of the most colorful symbols of the culture of Edo, the neighborhood fire brigades charged with combating the fires that occurred at least once every two years during the nineteenth century, many of these forms of social mobilization have been organized at the neighborhood level (Waley 1984, xxv). In contemporary times, neighborhoods have also proved to be important forms of social organization for protests against industrial pollution, for rights to 84 "NEW" TOKYO STORY sunshine being lost through Tokyo's first wave of...