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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 the middle class constituted a small fraction 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 woman,” or moga. Moreover, the towering presence of Hokkaido Imperial University, with its premier agricultural research facilities and wide range of high cultural activities, provided a strong intellectual coloration for the Sapporo middle class.

In Okayama, located along the Pacific corridor close to Kobe and Osaka, the war boom expanded factory production in what was, by 1914, an already industrial city. Economic growth intensified tensions between a large and growing working class and a powerful and increasingly organized business community. Such tensions expressed themselves in citizen’s rallies and other forms of popular protest that became familiar elements of local politics well before the war. Even so, when skyrocketing food prices and rice shortages touched off rioting throughout the country in 1918, the scope and violence of local protests shocked the city. Conditions that caused barely a ripple in Sapporo provided a flashpoint for Okayama’s politically organized working class. As May Day demonstrations, labor strikes, antiprostitution rallies, and other forms of mass protest followed closely on the heels of the rice riots, Okayama became known as a hotbed of political and social activism and a center of the Taishō democracy movement.

A coastal city and former seat of feudal government, Kanazawa resembled Okayama in many respects. Both cities were proud of their castle town heritage and their traditions of scholarship and artisan crafts. Yet Kanazawa, situated along what had become Japan’s “back side,” experienced difficulty attracting capital for new industrial ventures. Instead, the city focused on reconstituting its traditional industries—lacquerware, gold inlay, and embroidered fabric. Local entrepreneurs turned remoteness into a selling point, investing in hot springs resorts in the nearby mountains and advertising the city’s virtues as a tourist spot. Marketing itself as a city of crafts for the modern age and promoting its old world charm, local boosters turned “tradition” into a Kanazawa trademark.

While Niigata shared with Kanazawa the misfortune of location on Japan’s back coast, the long-standing centrality of the port to the urban economy provided an adaptable resource for local development. This legacy helped Niigata secure the distinction of becoming one of the five open ports granted trading privileges in 1858. Although the benefits of this coup did not live up to expectations, fortune smiled on Niigata again when the Meiji government anointed the city as the seat of prefectural government in the new administrative order. As Niigata’s experience reveals, however, political privilege does not necessarily trump geographic disadvantage. The city often lost out in the competition for resources and investment in the early years of state-led development. Even so, the town fathers pinned their hopes on the potential of the port, investing heavily in a variety of improvements in the teens and twenties that expanded capacity and improved the city’s connection with the national rail grid. Niigata’s importance as a transit point increased dramatically during the World War One boom, but the city hit pay dirt in the 1930s, when the invasion of China and the creation of the yen block in Japanese-occupied Asia turned the back coast into a gateway to the new Asian empire.

Diverse local conditions meant that policies of national development and the World War One boom affected individual cities in very different ways. As the stories of these four cities illustrate, there was no such thing as a typical small town in modern Japan. Indeed, the myth of the typical small town is itself a product of this moment in urban history, when Tokyo-centrism and the mystique of the hometown became core elements of social ideology. In choosing these particular cities as case studies, I make no claim that they represent some larger sample of regional or other urban types. Although all four are second-tier cities and prefectural capitals, not only their commonalities but also their idiosyncrasies stand out—the serendipitous and conjunctural forces that shaped their particular historical trajectories. As their diverse stories tell us, there is no single master narrative of twentieth-century modernization; nor is there a standard account for the metropolis and an alternative time line for every other place. Just as the Kanazawa story yields important insights into the particularities of the Tokyo case, a case study of Iowa City can force a rethinking of the place of New York in American history. Instead of conceiving of provincial cities or even Japan itself as an example of some kind of alternative modernity, I suggest in this book ways that the so-called standard-bearers of the modern are themselves outliers and exceptions.

The divergences in the local experience of national development and global capitalism were expressed in the character of libraries and archives, among other places. Embarking on the research for this book, I quickly discovered that historical records are strikingly uneven, and that what one city archive possesses in abundance is nowhere to be found in another. Niigata offered a surplus of guides to local businesses but few arts magazines. Sapporo presented a gold mine of literati journals but little on the local-history movement. Kanazawa lovingly preserved manuscripts penned by local writers, but documents on local politics were harder to come by. As I eventually realized, such gaps provided clues in themselves, helping me to focus on significant variations in the four stories of urban modernization.

In the tracks of the provincial city, I draw on such materials as yearbooks, chamber of commerce records, company histories, social surveys and reports, tourist guides and travel diaries, local magazines and newspapers, city plans, and memoir literature. These sources document the World War One boom and the transformation of urban life in Sapporo as well as the 1918 rice riots and images of an insurrectionary lumpen proletariat in Okayama. They tell the story of Niigata’s department stores, Okayama’s sports teams, and Kanazawa’s community of artists and writers. All these regional cultures of modernity referenced and borrowed from Tokyo models and were inevitably shaped by the prodigious cultural power of the metropolis. But they were also part of a much larger network of cultural production that branched out in all directions, connecting Kanazawa to its own peripheries, Niigata to the Asian continent, Sapporo to its neighboring cities, and Okayama to the Kansai urban complex of Kyoto, Kobe, and Osaka. By engaging urban culture beyond the metropolis, this study shows that Japanese modernity was not simply made in Tokyo and exported to the provinces. Rather it was coconstituted through the dynamic interaction of provincial cities with the capital, as well as through the circulation and exchange of people and ideas throughout the country.

THE CITY AS SUBJECT

This book approaches the modern city from two conceptual vantage points. First, I envision the city as a constellation of institutions—government bureaucracies, factories, schools, department stores, and radio stations among them—that create the material contours of the city. They define its territorial boundaries and structure its social life. They provide the foundation for the economy, channel political action, and mediate the relationship between the local residents and the social world outside the city limits. I also look at the city as a set of ideas—a social imaginary, to borrow Cornelius Castoriadis’s phrase.⁸ For me this means the intellectual field upon which people projected their beliefs about the city. The imaginary domain of the city housed residents’ expectations for urban life and their sense of belonging to an urban community—what they thought it meant to be “urban.” By using the term social imaginary, I want to convey the open-ended, creative element in the urbanist social thought of these years—its utopian and dystopian moods, the succession of thought experiments that recast urban worlds.

These two dimensions of the city—as a matrix of ideas and as a socio-institutional network—came together through the actions of the individuals who inhabited the city. The key questions that emerge here concern the human actors who occupy the center of my story: How did urban residents respond to the nationalizing and globalizing forces reshaping their world? How did their actions help construct a community of shared interests, beliefs, and ideals—to produce, in other words, a modern urban subject? In their provocative book on social theory, Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry Ortner point out that the organization of space and time structures everyday life and individual consciousness. In this sense the space-time of the modern city is built on the relationship between material structures, ideology, and action: “The organization of space (in homes, in villages, in cities) and time (the rhythms of work, leisure, holidays) embody the assumptions of gender, age, and social hierarchy upon which a particular way of life is built. As the actor grows up, lives everyday life within these spatial and temporal forms, s/he comes to embody those assumptions, literally and figuratively. The affect is one of near total naturalization of the social order, the forging of homologies between personal identification and social classification.”⁹

As 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.