Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young
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Kamura Kōsaku offered guidance at the Ishikawa Prefectural Library. My apologies to anyone I inadvertently omitted from this list because of a failure of memory or record keeping. I am extraordinarily grateful for the opportunity to have met the wonderful communities of local historians in what I have come to think of as “my four cities” and for their generous assistance in my research.
This book was begun while I worked at New York University and completed after I moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Both institutions provided generous financial support: at NYU through a Freeman Foundation grant and the Research Challenge Fund; at the UW through the Graduate School, the Vilas Foundation, and the Institute for Research in Humanities. Colleagues at both schools have shaped my thinking about cities and urban culture. At NYU I benefited in particular from conversations with Ada Ferrer, Manu Goswami, Harry Harootunian, Walter Johnson, Rebecca Karl, Yanni Kotsonis, and Joanna Waley-Cohen. At the UW-Madison, David Lehene, Richard Miller, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Jim Raymo, Steve Ridgely, Ben Singer, Steve Stern, and Sarah Thal read portions of the work in progress and provided excellent feedback.
Financial support for research in Japan came from the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for Humanities, and the Fulbright Foundation, where Itō Jinko and Iwata Mizuho offered both timely assistance and good humor. I offer my thanks to Hasebe Hiroshi and the staff at Seikei University Center for Asia and Pacific Studies for providing accommodation and an institutional affiliation during one of my research visits, and to Barbara Satō for arranging the whole visit. I also benefited from a semester in residence at the Kyoto University Institute for Research in Humanities, which Yamamuro Shin’ichi helped set up, and where he and Kagotani Naoto, Mizuno Naoki, Takagi Hiroshi, and Yamamoto Yūzo provided a congenial intellectual community.
Other friends and colleagues whose critical support is gratefully acknowledged include Kim Brandt, Geoffrey Chambers, John Dower, Eguchi Keiichi, Jim Fujii, Laura Hein, Igarashi Takeshi, Mark Jones, Naitō Sachiko, Naitō Tsuneiji, Nishimura Shigeo, Nishimura Takako, Okabe Makio, Okamoto Kōichi, John Ratté, Lou Ratté, Jordan Sand, Barbara Satō, and Satō Kazuki.
Melissa Dale, Ken Kawashima, Kimiko Osawa, Rebecca Shearier, and Ayako Yoshimura provided research assistance at different stages of the project. I wish to also thank the wonderful editorial staff at University of California Press, including Niels Hooper and Kim Hogeland, as well as Daniel Rivero at the Weatherhead Institute.
Nan Enstad, Carol Gluck, Andrew Gordon, Crawford Young, and an anonymous reader from UC Press read the entire manuscript at the penultimate stage. Their comments were invaluable in helping me tighten and refine the central argument.
A special debt is owed my mother, Rebecca Young, whose irrepressible enthusiasm for all things urban and whose keen appreciation for the aesthetics of interwar culture provided inspiration for this project. My work on Beyond the Metropolis coincided with her ten-year battle with cancer; her grace and courage sustained me, always. I dedicate this book to her memory with love and admiration.
PART ONE
Contexts
Introduction
URBANISM AND JAPANESE MODERN
THE AGE OF THE CITY
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. 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 floors. Factory growth generated unprecedented wealth for a new breed of managers and entrepreneurs, whose leadership in civic organizations and political life enlarged the scope of municipal ambition. Municipalities invested in electricity, roads, telephone lines, and other city services to accommodate their burgeoning populations. They extended communication networks to encompass an expanding zone of suburban development. In all these ways the age of the city signaled both a new importance for the urban economy and a new scope of operations for municipal government.
It also became a vehicle for the rising power of a new middle class of professionals and intellectuals within urban society and politics. Growth of white collar employment in factories and local government, the proliferation of public and private networks of city services, and the expansion of urban commerce and culture industries all swelled the ranks of the new middle class, which grew from an estimated 4 percent of the population in 1915 to 12 percent in 1925. Since these figures reflected national averages, one can assume the percentage was higher in cities.2 Though numerically