Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young
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my study shows, new urban social orders were also a site of contest; emergent systems of social classification were riven with contradictions. Grounded in the space-time of urban life, Japanese social imaginaries provided a space for floating experimental visions of radical transformation, but also for constructing the matrix of urban ideology. In the latter case, a set of myths emerged during this period of intellectual ferment. Ideas such as urban-growthism and Tokyo-centrism naturalized particular sociopolitical arrangements even as they concealed the uneven allocation of the benefits of urbanization.
Methodologically, this approach situates my work at the interstices of social and cultural history. I examine the ways that the subjective dimensions of culture—thought, ideology, and consciousness—condition and are conditioned by the material processes of social life. I look at how cultural production is embedded within political and social economies, is linked to social geography and geopolitics, and determines issues of governmentality and social control. Such a conceptual vantage point lets us bring into focus the ways that culture and economy inflect each other and helps us see how both are shot through with politics. It helps illuminate, in other words, the lived interdisciplinarity of social life.
The book opens with a chapter organized around the question of historical moment: Why did the discovery of the city occur in the interwar period? Chapter 1 examines the ways World War One triggered a widespread rethinking of the meaning of the city as a social and economic space. From here the narrative is divided into two parts, focusing analysis on the spatial and temporal structures that give form to the modern city. The first of these narratives (chapters 2 and 3) looks at the spatial relationships that turned local cities into peripheries of the new national capital, Tokyo, at the very time these cities became centers of regional networks of towns, villages, and rural hinterlands. Here I examine the economic force fields generated by the railway revolution and the new cultural geographies created by institutions of higher education and the publishing industry. As circuits of intellectual circulation and exchange were superimposed on the railway map, they infused geography with new forms of social power. These chapters tell the story of how geo-power gave rise to urban-centrism, tracing the creation of a modern urban-rural system and a national hierarchy of cities with Tokyo at its apex.
The next part (chapters 4 and 5) shifts from space to time, examining the multiple temporalities of the modern city. As municipalities cast about for a means to absorb the flood of in-migration in the teens and twenties, they mobilized the idea of a shared past and a common future to build a sense of community. Here I focus on the invention of urban biography through the local-history movement and on how the idea that “cities = future” spread through regional development movements. Just as provincial cities were constituted as both centers and peripheries, they were also perceived as chronotopes of both the past and the future. As we shall see, commentary on urban change figured provincial cities as a world apart from the metropolis, situating them in a space where the past was still present. At the same time, the pervasive and categorical distinctions between city and country imagined all cities, big and small, as sharing the temporality of modernity—as inhabiting a space where time ticked faster and change happened first. These chapters explore the reinvention of the idea of “the city,” tracing the emergence of the belief that urban centers were a natural community that crystallized the past, present, and future of the modern subject.
These sections fit into the book’s larger argument that interwar social and cultural movements reshaped the meaning of the city as well as its core structures. Whether through literary movements, regional history-writing, or industrial exhibitions, urban elites in provincial cities articulated a vision of modernity that sanctioned new power relationships, new economic disparities, and new social hierarchies, making them appear natural and inexorable. As this vision of the modern acquired a hegemonic status, it obscured the diverse and disparate experiences of modern life and masked the fact that human choice, not transcendent fate, created the winners and losers in the process of urban modernization. Both the material foundation of the modern city established in the interwar years and the epistemology that sustained it have proven remarkably enduring. They helped shape the faith in municipal governance and social planning that fueled expansion of the national defense state in wartime and the technocratic state in the postwar period. They survive in the commonsense points of reference by which we understand urban worlds even today.
ONE
World War One and the City Idea
In the new wave of investments triggered by World War One, the focus of Japan’s economic expectations shifted from the nation to the city, where the capitalist revolution’s deepening impact was most dramatically felt. Sudden and rapid urban growth stretched the capabilities of city services and strained the seams of the built environment. The war boom propelled new groups to positions of social prominence, swelling the ranks of the new middle and working classes. Though prosperity proved evanescent, the possibility of gaining fabulous wealth in a short period of time was etched in popular memory as a feature of the urban economy, one dimension of the economic and social volatility of modern economic growth. The war years marked the eruption of a new level of crowd violence, on the factory floor and especially in the street, as rice riots broke out in cities throughout the country. Thus, World War One inscribed the image of the city with a new economic and social identity: one associated with an explosive pace of change, with instability, and with the specter of intensified social violence.
Such visions of the city stood in contrast to older urban imaginaries. The feudal concept of the castle town, burnished over three centuries of political stability under Tokugawa rule, envisioned the city as a monument to the enduring power of the military elite. Tokugawa policies concentrated the ruling caste of samurai in the cities, where they constituted as much as 40 percent of the population. The remaining urban population of artisans and merchants supplied the needs and wants of the samurai.1 Organized as instruments of samurai rule, cities became seats of higher learning and administration, which Tokugawa law defined as the exclusive province of the samurai. With the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime, samurai dominance of the city ended and the myth of samurai permanence was shattered. In the urban reconstructions of the 1870s and 1880s a new vision emerged of the city as instrument of progress and modernity. Exemplified in the remaking of central Tokyo and the famous Ginza brick town, and in the new government buildings that shot up throughout the country, the urban reconstructions of the early Meiji period telegraphed a message to foreigners and Japanese alike about the city as symbol of Japan’s capacity for civilization and enlightenment. And though this urban imaginary embraced a sense of managed progress and controlled change, it little prepared people for the tumultuous transformations of the First World War.2
Examining the different ways in which World War One catalyzed urban change, this chapter takes up the following questions: Why did a discourse on the modern emerge with such peculiar force in the wake of World War One? What touched off the extended reflection on the newness of everyday life? To understand the intensity and volume of this intellectual production, the pages that follow canvass the impact of the war years on the urban economy, the built environment of the city, and urban society to show why these issues began to register so dramatically in the consciousness of urban residents.
THE ECONOMIC BOOM
Though of minimal significance for Japan militarily, World War One was the third of a series of wars that stimulated the formation of a modern industrial economy. Beginning with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, and followed by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, war booms shaped the contours of Japanese capitalism. Nascent factory production turned out armaments and ships to meet military demand and textiles bound for the East Asian markets that were captured in Japan’s first colonial wars. When war broke out in Europe in 1914 the resulting disruptions in the global economy provided an opening for Japanese trade expansion, ushering in the third war boom in the space of twenty years. Although the initial impact of the war was to depress economic activity because of the rupture to international trade, by 1916 the opportunities opened up by the European war had touched off what amounted to a new phase in Japan’s industrial revolution. The withdrawal of European textile and light industrial producers from colonial markets in Asia created a void into which Japanese manufacturers rapidly expanded. War cut them off from European sources of chemicals, machinery, and other heavy industrial products, stimulating the development of domestic