Competing Visions of the Modern: Urban Transformation and Social Change of Changchun, 1932-1957 (original) (raw)

Significant soil: settler colonialism and Japan's urban empire in Manchuria

Choice Reviews Online, 2016

hb, http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php? isbn=9780674504332 Before Japanese imperialism in Northeast China became a technocratic enterprise, it was a democratic one. So contends one of the most recent additions to the study of the Japanese empire, Significant Soil by Emer O'Dwyer. In this encyclopedic account, O'Dwyer examines how the city of Dairen (Dalian in Chinese) and the surrounding Kwantung Leased Territory came to represent an experiment in self-governance, from its acquisition after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 to its eclipse following the Manchurian Incident in 1931. O'Dwyer argues that the contestation and conflict over protecting Dairen's unique status within the continental empire created and conditioned the participatory politics of Japanese settlers living in the city. By bounding her narrative to Dairen, O'Dwyer deepens our understanding of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria within a field that has expanded rapidly since Louise Young's publication of Japan's Total Empire. Yet O'Dwyer has written the first book in English that makes rigorous use of newspapers and magazines printed in the leasehold, such as the Manshū nichi nichi shinbun, Dairen shinbun, and Kyōwa. The articles, commentaries, and even cartoons coming out of these periodicals not only document the vibrant public sphere in Dairen during these decades but also demonstrate a wealth of material untapped by O'Dwyer's predecessors in a systematic way. The intertwining of democracy with imperialism in the 1910s and 1920s looked quite different in the periphery than it did back in the metropole. For Andrew Gordon in Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, it was the urban poor and wage laborers staging protests and strikes who comprised the new body politic, or kokumin, in Tokyo. When O'Dwyer inverts Gordon's paradigm of 'imperial democracy' in the capital, she finds a divergent set of actors materializing as agents of 'democratic imperialism' in the colonies, namely Dairen's gentlemanly elite and educated professionals. (O'Dwyer does note the role of 'the crowd', but the sources remain silent on the identity of its members.) Here she reminds us of the very circumscribed franchise of voters: Japanese men over the age of 25 who owned a house in Dairen and paid an annual tax of at least five yen. Furthermore, the Kwantung Leasehold Territory, like other imperial holdings, did not have official representation in the Diet, though over 2 percent of parliamentary members in 1930 won as 'Manchurian candidates'that is, politicians residing in Dairen who had registered through their home district in Japan (46). (Given the small size of its population, Dairen actually suffered from over-representation.) Owing to these limitations on the electorate, O'Dwyer turns elsewhere for evidence for 'democratic political empowerment' in Dairen: the Municipal Council, the Mantetsu Employees Association, and the Manchurian Youth League (212). The key, as O'Dwyer points out, lies in the reality of democratic imperialism in Dairen resting upon Chinese urban poor and wage laborers, who had no voice in this grand experiment of self-governance.

Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949-2005

Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949-2005, 2006

In this pioneering study of contemporary Chinese urban form, Duanfang Lu provides an analysis of how Chinese society constructed itself through the making and remaking of its built environment. Drawing on archival documents, professional journals and her own fieldwork, Lu shows how China’s quest for modernity created a perpetual scarcity as both a social reality and a national imagination. Although planners attempted to apply modern planning techniques to the city, the realization of planning ideals was postponed. The conflicting relationship between scarcity and the socialist system created specific spatial strategies. The work unit – the socialist enterprise or institute – gradually developed from workplace to social institution which integrated work, housing and social services. The Chinese city achieved a unique morphology made up in large part of self-contained work units. Today, when the Chinese city has revealed its many faces, Remaking Chinese Urban Form presents a refreshing panorama of the nation’s mixed experiences with socialist and Third World modernity which is both timely and provocative.

Japanese Cities in Global Context, Special Issue Journal of Urban History (2016); Introduction: 1-14

Japan has been part of a transnational and cross-cultural exchange of planning ideas for many centuries. A comprehensive analysis of exchange between the island nation, its Asian neighbors, and the larger world is still missing, though there is a growing interest in the study of transnational and cross-cultural urbanism. The articles in this special section illustrate the multiple ways in which foreign influences have shaped and changed Japanese urban form and in which Japanese practices have influenced the built environment elsewhere. They explore the theoretical, methodological and practical results of this exchange. Sites discussed are inside Japan, notably Nagasaki and Tokyo, and also in the Japanese colonies (specifically through the lens of Seoul); and also outside Japan, specifically the US and Europe. This introduction sets up the background and larger context of urban history and planning in Japan, identifies the threads that link the articles, and proposes further directions for research.

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

Habitat International, 2005

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