The making of urban Japan: Cities and planning from Edo to the 21st century (original) (raw)

2005, Habitat International

Around a decade ago I was interviewed by a committee from the Japanese Diet visiting various countries where the national capital had been relocated in the 20th century (Australia, India, Brazil, etc.), specifically to investigate the effects on the abandoned previous capital (Melbourne, Calcutta, Rio, etc.). Some Japanese planners, not for the first time, were contemplating building a fresh, new capital city. What amazed, however, was the preface to the questioning (regarding the Melbourne-to-Canberra experience): the 20th had been the 'Japanese Century'-from basket case to world's second greatest economy-but nothing worthwhile had been left as celebratory evidence of that achievement, for posterity to admire. France in the 19th century left Paris, and England left London; and from other centuries there are Florence and Venice, or Athens, Rome, Vienna. But Japanese cities are mean, polluted, the public realm is ignored, and the place of civil society close to nonexistent. Andr! e Sorensen's book explores the background both to the perceptions and to the reality on which such perceptions might be based. The approach is appropriately historical. Japan's modernisation was late, relative to the West: the Meiji (Imperial) Restoration, ending the feudal period, was only in 1868; from 1871 to 1873 the Iwakura mission, including almost half the ruling elite plus bureaucrats and students, visited the West to study advanced Western technology and its acknowledged links to socio-political organisation and urbanisation (Germany, also late modernising, was much admired); and so by 1873 Japan had been launched on a crash program of domestic reform based on Western models. Urban improvement was initiated (boulevards to impress the visitor, but not parks!), but all attempts to implement a building code failed-only owners of substantial property had the suffrage, and these were precisely the group most likely to be adversely affected by such restrictions. When such a code was finally passed in 1919, it was weak, and property rights reigned supreme. And all the time there was nothing of the powerful urban reform movement that characterised Britain and the US in the late 19th century, nor of the active professional associations of architects and engineers pushing for tougher regulation and more sophisticated planning found throughout Western countries. The story that Sorensen tells is indeed largely one of conservative resistance to any curbs on property rights or on uncontrolled industrialisation (Osaka's proud boast to be ''the Capital of Smoke''), peppered with atrociously destructive urban shocks: the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923), the World War II fire bombing, the Great Hanshin (Kobe) Earthquake (1995). There were other, less dramatic but more insidious shocks, pre-eminently the oil price hikes of the 1970s and the end of the postwar boom, and the 1990s decade of recession. But through all these discontinuities there was always the continuity of the suppression of any emergent civil society, and the triumphant rise of the farm lobby. The postwar Allied Occupation had initiated a radical land reform, to break up large holdings and to redistribute land; tenant farmers became (very) small landowners, and so there was created a vast new rural interest and lobby. Then a pro-farmer gerrymander in the electoral system ensured decades of conservative, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) governments rewarding