Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young
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boom. Taken from a Japanese chess move that aggrandized a pawn into a more powerful piece, the term was applied after the Russo-Japanese War to a handful of speculators like Suzuki Kyūgorō, who got rich quick playing the stock market. After his sudden acquisition of wealth catapulted Suzuki into a position of social prominence, he remained in the public spotlight by frittering away his earnings in a life of ostentatious dissipation. Men like Suzuki became symbols of rogue capitalism, speculators who operated on the boundaries of legitimacy and whose relentless pursuit of profits caused panics and otherwise endangered the economy.
The narikin were enhanced by the aura of the stock market, and their reputation was inseparable from popular images of this new capitalist institution. Established in the late nineteenth century, the securities market became an important avenue of business finance; however, the primacy of government-controlled banks, and of the house banks of the big-business organizations known as zaibatsu, meant that it would always remain a less reputable and less secure means of industrial finance.18 Moreover, while government policies that promoted private industry smiled upon upright businessmen such as the founders of factories, stock traders were regarded with some suspicion—the dark twin of the good capitalist who strove to grow the economy in the name of building Japan’s wealth and power. As the economic boom of World War One expanded entrepreneurial opportunities, the number of parvenu capitalists multiplied and the narikin dominated the ranks of businessmen in all fields of activity. No longer considered economic adventurers and associated with the shady economic underworld of the stock market, the narikin entered the mainstream of economic activity and became the symbol of the go-go economy and urban prosperity.19
Yamamoto Isaburō of Okayama was a case in point. A local shipping magnate who made his fortune during the war, Yamamoto became a celebrity both for his eccentric and flamboyant habits and for his public munificence. In attracting notoriety, Yamamoto represented a complicated symbol of the modern economy. His meteoric rise into the plutocratic ether was made possible by speculative investments during the war boom, but it also followed a lifetime’s diligent pursuit of self-improvement, in which he had followed the sanctioned road to upward mobility via hard work, education, and duty to company. Born into modest circumstances, Yamamoto spent his childhood laboring in a tofu store to augment the family income. Although poverty precluded him from regular attendance at elementary school, he subsequently found the wherewithal to matriculate at middle school, to gain admittance to the elite Dōshisha University in Kyoto, and from there, to move on to and graduate from Sapporo Agricultural College. He used his university contacts to good effect, involving himself in land development and agribusiness in Hokkaido, then using his connection with former teacher Nitobe Inazo to secure a post in a Tokyo trading company. After Yamamoto strove to establish himself within the ranks of senior management, a lucky break left him in a position to take over the firm when the president suddenly died in the early 1910s. The timing could not have been better: on the eve of the First World War, Yamamoto found himself well placed to take aggressive advantage of opportunities in the East Asian trade; by the late teens he had ridden the war boom to amass a reputed fortune of 40 million yen. Thus, through good fortune and hard work, the humble tofu boy had bootstrapped his way to a position of wealth and social influence. Self-made men like Yamamoto united the good capitalist and his more dangerous twin in the new figure of the narikin, who was redefining the face of the urban economy.
Yamamoto’s rags-to-riches story modified the existing narrative of the narikin in other ways as well. Like other wartime parvenus, Yamamoto achieved notoriety both for his good deeds and his outrageous behavior. His most prominent act as public benefactor was a donation of eighteen thousand yen for a public library, built in 1917 and boasting sixty-three thousand volumes. Yamamoto housed his new library in modern architectural splendor, presenting Okayama city with one of its first two-story buildings constructed with reinforced concrete. He demonstrated his public munificence in other ways as well, financing a local newspaper and establishing the Yamamoto Agricultural School in Kume County, where he was born. Probably more than his good deeds, however, Yamamoto’s ostentatious lifestyle made him the stuff of urban legend. He earned the sobriquet “tiger magnate” (tora daijin) after he led two hundred men on a much photographed tiger hunt in Korea. He enhanced his reputation for extravagant amusement when he staged a sensational contest between Tokyo and Kyoto geisha. Reserving an entire train traveling from Tokyo to Kyoto for a party of friends and a company of Tokyo geisha, he followed these onboard festivities with a lavish party in Kyoto, where the local geisha had their turn to entertain. During the war boom such stories of the eccentricities of overnight millionaires—their excessive generosity and their excessive extravagance—turned the narikin into local legends. Standing out from the ranks of the ordinary businessman—the bland and timorous salaryman—the narikin exuded brazen self-confidence and hypermasculinity. Symbols of an age of excess, the narikin were larger than life, social abnormalities that defined the new social extremes that the modern economy could produce.20
Though stories about shipping magnates such as Yamamoto fed the stereotype of the narikin, the term also applied to other beneficiaries of the new urban prosperity. In a city like Kobe, where the local economy was anchored to shipbuilding, the demand for ships brought a wave of prosperity that lifted the fortunes of many local residents. As one observer noted in 1918: “In Kobe the capitalists, the ship owners, and the laborers have all become narikin. To put it another way, Kobe itself has become a narikin.”21 Others commented on the extraordinary wage hikes commanded by skilled labor, especially those working in munitions factories. Workers were said to “disport themselves like narikin, hiring prostitutes, some of them even commuting back and forth to work from the red light district. Workers are welcomed in the cafés and restaurants like the god of wealth.”22 In Sapporo, the surging demand for agricultural exports brought prosperity not only to shipping interests but also to farm supply firms and local transport companies and to food processing, marketing, and warehousing operations. Locally, the lexicon of the nouveau riche expanded beyond mere “shipping magnates” ( funa narikin) to include the “starch millionaires” (denpun narikin), who owned potato-processing companies, as well as the “giant radish” (daikon), “pumpkin” (kabocha), and “pig” (buta) narikin who were bringing new custom to Sapporo’s shopping districts as they accompanied their families to town to spend their newfound wealth.23 As such commentary revealed, the narikin had come to embody the social possibilities raised by the modern economy, as well as to symbolize rapid growth and urban prosperity.
Ultimately the figure of the narikin proved a disquieting image, for the fortunes of the narikin, like the urban economy itself, fell as dramatically and rapidly as they had risen. If the narrative of the narikin that took form in the war boom began with social obscurity, it ended in financial calamity. Yamamoto Isaburō was no exception: he lost his entire fortune in the catastrophic postwar depression that set in after 1920, when European traders returned to reclaim their markets and demand for Japanese shipping dried up. The cascade of bankruptcies among the narikin demonstrated that, while growth in the modern economy generated unprecedented prosperity, it also brought unprecedented insecurity, a lesson reinforced by the swelling ranks of the unemployed that became a symbol of the postwar bust. But even as their fortunes fell, the fate of the narikin advertised the mixed blessings of the modern economy, for along with memories of the volatility and risk, the uncertainty and insecurity, narikin left behind permanent monuments to their fame and munificence. The libraries and the schools, no less than the tales of wild parties and tiger hunts, spoke to the social possibilities of urban capitalism, nurturing hopes for a return to prosperity and stoking dreams of instant wealth and conspicuous consumption.
THE SPECTER OF THE URBAN CROWD
Even more than the oversized figure of the narikin, the rise of worker radicalism and urban protest in the late teens signaled the dangers inherent in the new urban economy. World War One marked the onset of a new level of urban violence, as the eruption of popular rage in the rice riots of the summer of 1918 underscored the instability of urban society. And just as the accelerated urbanization of these years generated new meanings of the city in terms of physical space and economic function, the rice riots heightened fears that modern urban society was violently unpredictable and constituted a serious threat to political order.
Volatile rice prices provided the trigger for the riots that engulfed the country in