Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young
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of urban society, it nevertheless exerted enormous influence over municipal politics and administration, key cultural institutions such as the press and higher education, and business organizations. Commentary on the Taishō democracy movement by scholars such as the famous Tokyo University political scientist Yoshino Sakuzō and the eminent Kyoto University sociologist Yoneda Shōtarō vested great expectations in the leadership of the new middle class. Standing at the vanguard of a host of progressive political and social movements, intellectuals and technocrats would lead Japan into a bright and better future.3 As these observers noted, the new middle class cast an oversize shadow on the cities of interwar Japan.
At the same time, city growth altered existing social arrangements and generated new ways both of dividing people and, conversely, of bringing them together. Modern institutional structures such as the higher educational system and the publishing industry privileged cities and urban dwellers over the countryside economically and culturally; within cities they helped constitute hierarchies of class. They also produced an ideology of urban-centrism—the idea that modern cities possessed a kind of manifest destiny to expand their territory, power, and resources. Urban-centrism celebrated urban growth and measured the value of cities in terms of their size. It portrayed urban expansion as the diffusion of progress and modernity to the countryside and justified the resulting disparities in the distribution of power and resources. This process did not displace the nation but rather upstaged it, for now urban centers seemed to present the most pressing problems, the most dramatic changes, the most alluring possibilities. The Japanese discovered the city.
They were not alone in this discovery. Indeed, the early twentieth century was a global moment for urban growth, as an international fixation with cities in mass culture, philosophy, literature, and the arts attested. From Baltimore to Moscow, from Paris to Buenos Aires, from Tianjin to Dakar—cities became the staging ground for wide-ranging social, cultural, economic, and political transformations. As in Japan, the rise of social problems, the formation of a consumer marketplace, the proliferation of streetcars and streetcar suburbs, and the cascade of investments in urban development reinvented the city as both sociospatial form and set of ideas. Throughout the world, discourses on social change associated the city with modernity and the future.
This book centers its story on the age of the city in the interwar period, a global moment when the material and ideological structures that constitute “the city” took their characteristic modern shape. As elsewhere in the world, the foundation for much of this was laid in the late nineteenth century, when the spread of industrial capitalism and the nationalization of the masses transformed urban space. For Japan, the political lineaments of the modern city were created in the administrative reforms of 1889 that established the “city, town, village” (shichōson) system. The design of a national school system and railway grid provided institutional anchors for cities and connected them with one another. War booms accompanying the Sino-Japanese (1894–95) and Russo-Japanese (1904–5) Wars spurred the spread of urban-based factory production and modern industry, as well as new forms of wealth and poverty. The war booms also stimulated the growth of the publishing and newspaper industry, core elements in the cultural fabric of the modern city. In all these ways the rise of the modern urban form rested on the foundations of the Meiji city. Nevertheless, as the following pages will show, the World War One boom ushered in a new age of the city, accelerating urban expansion to an entirely different level of intensity.
THE VIEW FROM THE PROVINCES
Historians have overwhelmingly told this story from the vantage point of Tokyo, newly designated, in 1868, as the national capital of the empire of Japan. Standard narratives assume that from 1868 on, government and civic leaders in Tokyo invented modern institutions and dispatched them to the provinces. They suggest, moreover, that the diffusion of Tokyo models created a dynamic of imitation that placed localities in a condition of perpetual catch-up with the capital. This is particularly true of interwar urban history, which portrays Tokyo as the center and most active site of the modernist social and cultural movement.4 In many ways the historiographic tendency toward Tokyo-centrism speaks to a deeper conviction about the homogenizing effects of modernization that shoehorns a wide world of experience into a single mold. However, a closer look at provincial cities challenges such beliefs. In fact, as scholars of regional studies have pointed out, cities outside the metropolis generated distinctive cultures of modernism that often referenced Tokyo models but also influenced new cultural and social forms in the metropolis.5 And contrary to assertions of homogenization, the history of different localities reveals enormous variation in modern urban forms. By centering the story on Japan’s provincial cities, this study breaks apart the assumption that the metropolis can serve as the defining lens for a history of Japanese modernity.
In the history of Japanese urbanism in the teens, twenties, and thirties, much of the action took place outside Tokyo. Beyond the metropolis was the world of the provincial city—chihō toshi. Since it included all cities outside the “big six” major metropolitan centers (Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Kobe, Kyoto, and Nagoya), the category of “local city” encompassed cities of a wide range of shapes and sizes.6 While the World War One boom fed the growth of the big six, equally striking was its impact on the small and medium city. In the regional turn of interwar Japan, local cities rose to prominence as centers of burgeoning regional economies. If the late nineteenth century was the age of the metropolis, the interwar years belonged to the city more generally.
This study focuses on second-tier cities, tracking the discourse on the modern in the four provincial cities of Sapporo, Kanazawa, Okayama, and Niigata.7 As prefectural capitals, these cities constituted the economic, political, and cultural centers of their respective regions. They were seats of municipal and prefectural government, centers of regional industry, and major transportation hubs. They held a concentration of institutions of higher learning and provided a platform for regional publishing. All four, like the metropolitan giants, grew at an enormous rate in the teens and twenties. Yet with populations in 1920 ranging from 50,000 to 150,000, they not only represented a scale of city different from that of the metropolis of Tokyo (with a population in 1920 of 3.3 million) but also maintained peripheral relationships with the capital of the Japanese empire.
Despite such commonalities, these four cities occupied vastly different positions in relation to the social structures and historical processes of the nation-state and the capitalist economy. Sapporo was a Hokkaido “frontier town” that sprang up on land the Japanese appropriated from the indigenous Ainu population in the late nineteenth century. Seats of provincial commerce and government since the Tokugawa period (1603–1868), Kanazawa and Okayama developed modern urban institutions atop the infrastructures of the castle town. In the waning days of feudal power, the coastal city of Niigata was designated one of five open ports where foreign traders were permitted commercial access. As the port grew, Niigata became a point of entry for European imports into the region and, later, a critical entrepôt for trade with the rest of Asia. The increasing orientation of Japan’s economy toward the Pacific coast shaped the fates of cities, leaving Niigata (facing Asia and removed from the economic centers of Tokyo and Osaka) on the wrong side of the geography of power and placing Okayama (on the Pacific side, near Osaka) directly in the path of economic progress. The diverse histories of these provincial cities reflected, on the one hand, uneven application of the centralizing and standardizing tendencies of the nation-state and, on the other, the social and economic disparities generated by capitalist modernization.
The story of urbanization varies considerably when viewed through the lens of particular cities. In the case of Sapporo, the World War One boom led not to the emergence of heavy and chemical industries but rather to the expansion of the service and consumer sectors of the economy. This meant that white-collar employment saw significant job growth, which had profound implications for local representations of class and gender. A large middle class emerged, constructing its identity not so much against an organized working class as against a marginalized underclass of street sweepers, garbage collectors, and foragers. In addition, the nature of economic growth in Sapporo made women more prominent agents of the modern economy. They were visible as consumers, but also as the clerks, ticket takers, and hostesses who represented the public face of service capitalism. This leant a decidedly local cast to the Sapporo image of the “modern