Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young
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demand for armaments and other military goods further encouraged the growth of heavy industry. Japanese shippers were called on to handle this increased trade and Japanese yards to build the ships. All this generated a degree of economic expansion that surpassed the earlier war booms. Moreover, unlike during those earlier wars, military activity was limited to a bloodless occupation of German holdings in China and the Pacific, which meant that World War One was not associated with the deprivation and sacrifice that had attended the earlier periods of rapid growth. Far from it, this war boom brought with it a sense of sudden wealth, wide-spread prosperity, and conspicuous consumption.
The war boom profoundly affected urban economies. While the late nineteenth-century wave of industrialization occurred mainly in and around the metropolises of Tokyo and Osaka and their affiliated ports of Yokohama and Kobe, the World War One boom left its mark on cities of all sizes. In terms of raw statistics, Tokyo and Osaka may have grown bigger and more quickly than the second-tier cities like the four in this book, but the impact of explosive economic growth on those smaller cites was just as intense. Fifty new companies were established in the city of Okayama between 1916 and 1920, and 99 in Sapporo between 1912 and 1920.3 Investments in Kanazawa’s economy spurred leaps in production, pushing the value of manufacturing from 18 million yen in 1916 up to 50 million yen in 1920.4 Between 1912 and 1921, the value of heavy industrial production in Niigata rose by a factor of 11, from 2.5 million yen to 27.2 million yen.5 The speed of this expansion not only anchored the urban economy to manufacturing but also associated the modern city with dynamism and rapid economic growth. The surge in urban investment reflected a new confidence in the future of the city.
Economic growth signaled a rise in the movement of goods in and out of the city. Though it expanded everywhere, trade grew most sharply in a port city like Niigata, where goods handled by the harbor rose from 13 million yen in 1912 to 30 million yen in 1921, more than doubling in ten years. Over the same period freight passing through the city’s two principal train stations quadrupled, increasing from 10.5 million yen to 46.2 million yen.6 The growth in their economies integrated cities such as Niigata more closely into national and international markets and marked urban space more distinctly as a node within the modern trade nexus. That, in turn, implied the new power of urban economies to influence partners in trade and, with it, new vulnerabilities to the vicissitudes of the market. The growth of trade also raised the economic profile of cities, identifying them with their key exports and stamping them with the character of their productive base. Kanazawa thus became known as a city of crafts, producing hanabusae silk cloth, gold leaf, and lacquerware. With its oil refineries, Niigata was seen as a center for heavy industry. Okayama was a textile producer, and the beer that took the Sapporo trademark became the symbol of the city’s ties to agriculture and the importance of its food processing industries.
The nature of economic activity changed as well during the teens, stamping the urban economy with the imprimatur of modern factory production. One measure of this was the sharp growth in numbers of urban factories. In Okayama 11 new factories employing more than ten workers were established between 1912 and 1920; Sapporo had 52 factories in 1912 and 121 in 1920. Kanazawa’s statistical yearbook recorded 190 factories with 6,141 employees in 1916 and 287 factories in 1919 with 8,556 employees.7 As an Okayama factory survey of 1921 showed, not only did World War One trigger a numerical rise in factories, it also impelled transformation of existing factory production, both in terms of scale (number of workers) and the shift to steam- and gas-powered mechanization. Even the growth of small factories (employing fewer than ten laborers) signaled a shift in the meaning of production, for the war boom generated a movement from household manufacture and the putting-out system to factory-based manufacture of goods such as furniture, lacquerware, tatami mats, umbrellas, and geta (traditional Japanese wooden clogs). For example, the number of factory workers producing lacquerware in Niigata rose from 129 in 1916 to 402 in 1918, a threefold increase. Within the space of a few years production of geta shifted from households concentrated in the neighborhood of Getamachi to factories. Such moves to the factory both altered the relationship of workers to production and changed the socioeconomic character of neighborhoods like Getamachi.8
To the political and economic elites who were privy to this knowledge, such statistics demonstrated the capacity of the urban economy to generate ever greater wealth, one more measure of the potential benefits of modern industry. The broader urban citizenry took much the same message from the evidence all around them of new ways to make and spend money. The transformations taking place before their eyes demonstrated to urban residents that cities were now characterized by rapid, even explosive, growth. Cities had become sites of industrial modernity, symbolized by the conversion to factory production and by factory mechanization. As a tendency to identify cities with their principal products revealed, this new urban imaginary fore-grounded economic function: Japanese began to equate cities with their economic base. Wartime developments harnessed Japanese cities ever tighter to the engine of industrial expansion; their fate now hung on the future of the Japanese economy. In all these respects, the latest war boom altered the meaning of the city as an economic entity, and the possibilities for urban growth seemed boundless.
Yet there was a dark side to the new urban dynamics. Even as statistics captured for the record unprecedented economic growth, these numbers did not always translate into improved livelihood for city residents. Perhaps even more than the expansion of urban economic activity, the movements in prices and wages during World War One demonstrated the new volatility of the urban economy, for it could both raise and lower urban living standards. While wage increases were widely welcomed by working-class urbanites, the price increases that soon followed were not. And though price increases improved profit margins of industrialists and merchants, they regarded wage hikes with alarm. Thus while inflation translated into a generalized sense of economic anxiety, the specific impact on prices and wages split workers and capitalists and served as one factor in the mounting tensions between new social groups.
Although wage and price inflation had been a conspicuous feature of the earlier war booms, nothing prepared Japanese people for the increases of the late teens. Wages began to rise in 1915 and 1916 and then suddenly accelerated their upward trajectory until they peaked in 1920. The movement of commodity prices told a similar story. In 1918 newspapers everywhere reported the “violent rise” (bōtō) in prices, and they were filled with articles documenting the alarming increase in the cost of living. Okayama’s San’yō shinpō reported a chamber of commerce survey of various shops in the city that compared basic food prices between 1914 and 1919; in an easy-to-read chart, the paper gave readers concrete numerical evidence on which to hang their feelings of alarm and outrage. Special-grade rice had more than doubled in price, table salt and cooking oil had tripled, and the fourteen other consumer staples included in the chart registered equivalent leaps in price. As bōtō became a catchphrase of the late teens, it underscored the dangers of rapid growth and the volatility inherent in the modern economy. Like prices of the late teens, the expanding urban economy could quickly spin out of control.9
THE CONSTRUCTION BOOM
While the explosive growth of World War One altered the economic meaning of the city, the physical transformation of urban sites over this same period changed the significance of the city in other ways. The rapid expansion of production, the rapid influx of population, and the rapid increase in the circulation of goods and people all placed pressing new demands on urban infrastructure, setting off a frenzy of construction that identified the city as a site of speed and ephemerality.
Electric power, introduced in the late 1880s, became exponentially more widespread in the teens, illuminating the streets, electrifying middle- and upper-class households, and transforming factory production. In Sapporo, for example, there were 255 streetlights in 1911; by 1920 the number had risen to 7,835. Over the same period households that were supplied with electricity increased from 2,695 to 21,075, and factory consumption leapt from four thousand to over 4 million kilowatt hours.10 While in previous decades, the gaslight and the spindle served as symbols of civilization and enlightenment, they were being replaced by a modernity of the neon sign and electrical appliance.
Like many cities, Kanazawa laid a streetcar line in the teens. Before it opened to great fanfare in early 1919, the streetcar necessitated