Urban Though

The Society for Japanese Studies
Tokyo as an Idea: An Exploration of Japanese Urban Thought until 1945

Author(s): Henry D. Smith
Source: The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter, 1978), pp. 45-80
Published by: The Society for Japanese Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/132072
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HENRY D. SMITH II
Tokyo as an Idea:
An Exploration of Japanese Urban Thought
Until 1945
The idea of the city in Japanese culture is elusive to begin with, and
the confused patterns of modern urban growth have done little to
clarify it. Yet at the same time, thought about "the city" in Japanese
society is today more vigorous and diverse than in the past. The very
fact that Japan is already, by some definitions, virtually one hundred
per cent urbanized is causing the Japanese more and more to struc-
ture their thinking about society and its evolution around the con-
cept of the city, as thinkers in the West have been doing since
Aristotle. It seems a good time to begin probing the traditional struc-
ture of Japanese urban thought and its modem evolution.
It is easy but misleading to explain the ambiguous structure of
Japanese urban thought by enumerating what it is not, in relation to
non-Japanese (primarily Western) ideas of the city: no indigenous
tradition of imposing cosmic symbolism on the form of the city; no
tradition of using the city as a metaphor for utopian ideals; and no
tradition of the city as an autonomous political unit (with certain
short-lived sixteenth century exceptions). All of these negative
characteristics can be fairly well explained, as they often are, by
Japan's insularity and consequent freedom from disruption by inter-
national trade or alien invaders, which helped to crystallize and
clarify the city in other cultures. Yet it seems equally important to
A preliminary version of this paper was prepared for the Workshop on the
Japanese City, Mt. Kisco, New York, April 23-26, 1976, sponsored by the Joint
Committee on Japanese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and
the Social Science Research Council.
45
46 Journal of Japanese Studies
explain the underlying structure of Japanese urban thought in terms

of what it was rather than what it was not: I will make some general
suggestions for this shortly.
But it is in the end impossible to avoid the comparison between
Japanese and Western ideas of the city, simply because the Japanese
have been so heavily influenced by the latter since the Meiji Restora-
tion. Even today, a substantial proportion of Japanese books on the
city are translations from Western languages. The co-existence of
continuing influences from the West with surviving traditional ideas
of the city immensely complicates the analysis of modem Japanese
urban thought. Such key phrases in urban political thought as "citi-
zen" and "autonomy," for example, have been used in almost
diametrically opposite senses, depending on whether the point of
reference was Japanese or Western tradition (and, of course, de-
pending still further on which of several Western traditions).
As a historian my interest lies in the period of the most traumatic
threat to the traditional bases of urban thought, namely, the adop-
tion of Western urban ideas during the Meiji period and the subse-
quent years of very rapid modem urban growth up to the 1930s. My
underlying interest is less in the particular case of Tokyo than the
broader one of "the city" as an idea in modem Japanese culture.
But there are several types of cities in Japan, and I have focused on
Tokyo as a useful, indeed essential, starting point, since for better or
for worse it was the capital that served as reference for most thought
about "the" city-both articulate and implicit-in the years be-
tween the Meiji Restoration and World War II. I recognize that this
bias obscures the unique character of other large Japanese cities,
particular Osaka, which both as a distinctive cultural tradition and as
a major economic force was in certain ways critical in molding ideas
of Tokyo. Similarly, I have neglected the idea of the provincial city,
which found some distinguished advocates before the war (for ex-
ample, Yanagita, #69, and linuma, #63), and which has become the
focus of much attention in recent years. Yet even in this case, Tokyo
has tended to remain the point of reference.
While my primary concern has been with the political aspects of
urban thought, I also found it necessary to devote attention to reli-
gious and aesthetic conceptions of the city, for these are often tightly
interwoven with political ideas. I have found it unprofitable at this
stage to define the limits of "urban thought," and I have doubtless
neglected many thinkers whose ideas have important urban implica-
tions. In the absence of any general writings on urban thought in
Japan, it has seemed most profitable to limit myself to the obvious
thinkers. My intent has been as much bibliographical as analytical,
Smith: Japanese Urban Thought 47
and I hope that the list of sources at the end may constitute a pre-
liminary reading list for those interested in pursuing the issues I
raise.
I. The Structure of Traditional Urban Thought
Traditional urban thought in Japan may be understood as two

layers: on the bottom a largely implicit set of indigenous attitudes
from the ancient and medieval periods; and on top an explicit and
highly intellectual structure of thought evolved under the Tokugawa
political system and molded by Confucian ideology. Symbolized,
respectively, by the miyako (Nara and then Heian) of the aristo-
cratic court and by the Tokugawa bakufu capital of Edo, these two
layers have never neatly joined nor have they been in open conflict.
Rather they remain two distinct approaches to the city, the one
sentimental and apolitical, the other intellectual and moralistic, a
contrast which remains in many ways apparent to this day.
Ancient Attitudes Toward the City. The older; implicit approach

to the city involves three attitudes:
1. The city as mediation forms the "ground bass" or basso os-
tinato of Japanese urban thought. Just as the Japanese myths, as
John Pelzel (#17) has stressed, reveal no essential contrast between
the land of the gods and the land of the mortals, so there is no
tension between the real capital and a heavenly form: rather as the
palace of the emperor it mediates between the kami and men. This is
in contrast to the Judeo-Christian symbolic dualism of the city over
which God presides (Jerusalem) and the city in which man has fallen
from harmony with God (Babylon), a moral dichotomy which struc-
tures much later Western urban thought (see #6 and #12). This is
also in contrast to the widespread ancient practice of conceiving the
city as a cosmic center, expressed through the imposition of an ideal
form. While the Japanese did in fact borrow such an intellectual
form from China, in the plans of Nara and Heian, they did not
sustain it.
The city is similarly a place of mediation between man and na-
ture. This is rooted in the indigenous sense of a continuum of man
and nature, and was sustained by the informal mixing of settled and
unsettled area in the actual form of the medieval capital: no wall
existed to provide either real or symbolic separation of man and
nature. In the aesthetic of the urban aristocracy, an ambiguity of
nature and artifice was highly prized. The city as mediation similarly
affirms multiplicity and simultaneity of function rather than a di-

chotomy of commercial and agrarian function. The capital is thus
both farm (inaka) and market (machi), as the proverb affirms: ky8 ni
inaka ari ("country in the capital," from the Kamigata syllabary
cards).
2. The city as process consists of two interwoven attitudes, the
affirming Shinto concept of cyclical renewal and the negating Bud-
dhist idea of impermanence (mujd). Both were sustained by the
Japanese practice of urban building almost exclusively in vegetable
materials (roof tiles were the major exception), subject both to pre-
dictable cycles of decay and to unpredictable but frequent destruc-
tion by fire (with ritual implications of purification). The idea of
cyclical renewal (see #16) found concrete expression in the festivals
(matsuri) that were celebrated in the traditional city in a pattern that
remained at one with the agricultural seasons (in contrast to Europe,
for example, where events in the life of Christ came to structure the
festival year). Even today the notion of periodic festival remains
crucial to the underlying Japanese sense of the city.
The Buddhist concept of impermanence created an idea of the
city as ephemeron, with its classic expression in the opening lines of
the early thirteenth century Hojjki (#18), in which both the houses
of the capital and those who dwell in them are like "the bubbles that
float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, not of long dura-
tion." Yet this is not a negation of the city in affirmation of a non-
urban environment, but rather the negation of all environment in
affirmation of mind. At any rate, total negation was rarely sustained
in Japanese thought, and the more characteristic expression of the
city as ephemeron was ukiyo, in its two meanings of "world of
sorrows" and "floating world." This admixture of a Buddhistic ne-
gation of the world and an aesthetic affirmation of the moment has
characterized all periods of urban cultural flowering in Japan, from
eighth-century Nara to post-earthquake Tokyo. It is a sensibility
which corresponds well with Carl Schorske's description of the
modern (and hence more secular) Western idea 'a la Baudelaire of
"the city beyond virtue and vice" (#12, pp. 109-1 0): "The city has
no structured temporal locus between past and future, but rather a
temporal quality. The modern city offered an eternal hic et nunc,
whose content was transience, but whose transience was perma-
nent. The city presented a succession of variegated, fleeting mo-
ments, each to be savoured in its passage from nonexistence to
oblivion."
3. The city as art, an idea that appears with the growth of great
cities anywhere, gained special strength in medieval Japan by its
clear dissociation from the idea of the city as political power. Behind
it lay the peculiar developments during the several centuries after
the founding of Heian: the growth of provincial power at the expense
of the capital, resulting in the sharp separation of power and author-
ity. The capital in this way achieved a special lure as art apart from
power and as symbol of the culture at large apart from such power-
evoking symbols as walls and monuments. The capital evoked both
the authority of letters (poetry more than learning) and the aesthetic
appeal of elegance and display. As Yanagita Kunio noted in 1929,
the capital was a "spiritual home" (kokoro no kokyo) for rural Ja-
pan, the source of everything precious and "even today a net which
draws us in, the garden of our dreams" (#69, pp. 243-4). As
Yanagita emphasized, this idea held only for the capital, not for the
"city" in general. It remains problematic how much the idea was
undercut when the "capital" was moved from Kyoto to Tokyo in
1868, thus reuniting power and authority.
Tokugawa Urban Thought: The Samurai Viewpoint. The upper

"layer" of traditional Japanese urban thought was formed as the
Tokugawa political system took shape in the seventeenth century. In
the course of time, two different viewpoints emerged within this
layer, that of the ruling samurai class and that of the subservient
chonin class.
The samurai viewpoint, which constituted the mainstream of To-
kugawa urban thought, was by no means consistent. In particular, it
was characterized from the start by a fundamental tension between:
1) an effectively pro-urban policy stemming from the specific politi-
cal need to keep the military class sequestered in cities, thereby
encouraging pervasive change through the growth of commerce,
money, and consumption; and 2) an expressly anti-urban ideology
stemming from the general political need to resist any destabilizing
change in the overall socio-economic structure. This tension gave
rise in the eighteenth century to a debate over pro-urban practice
versus agrarianist ideology which would continue into the twentieth
century. Each of these two positions implied a different conception
of the city.
On the one hand, pro-urban practice was rooted in the idea of the
city as power, with the following three characteristics:
1. The city was affirmed as the seat of the shogun or, at the han
level, of the daimyo. This was a bureaucratic rather than an ab-
solutist conception, as seen in the case of Edo, which was consid-
ered less the capital of the nation than the private castle of the
shogun and the administrative offices that it harbored. The com-
moner district of the city, and even most of t

the attending daimyo, were considered expend
(the point of reference in an urban form devis
fense; see #19, pp. 294-305), and was not an in
as power.
2. The commoner districts of Tokugawa political cities were
governed not as a homogeneous entity, but as an assemblage of
disparate administrative blocks, the ch6. To each ch8 were assigned
specific functions of local government to be carried out autonomously
but according to standard procedures, particularly the use of mutual
surveillance and mutual responsibility. "Autonomy" was thus
granted on sufferance, and was considered a delegated duty rather
than a right. The city was conceived as a varying number of inde-
pendent ch5, and had no corporate identity. Its governance was thus
essentially no different from that of the rural villages.
3. Since the physical stability of the city ensured the political
stability of the bakuhan system, Edo became the focus in the latter
half of the Tokugawa period of various fire-proofing schemes (#19,
pp. 365-403) to enhance the permanence of the city. These plans
typically involved rebuilding in brick or stone and concentration into
multi-storey row houses to provide room for wide firebreaks. Stimu-
lated by new knowledge of Western city-building, such plans were
never instituted until after the Meiji Restoration. Bakufu neglect of
major reforms to protect Edo from fire was perhaps a mark of belief
in the city as "ephemeron"; or more likely, it was because fire was
frequent only in the commoner city, leaving the bakufu and daimyo
territory (the "city as power") relatively safe.
Standing in opposition to the city as power was the agrarianist
conception of the city as corruption and change. This idea derived
from the Confucian conception of agriculture as the "root" and all
other economic activity as non-essential "branches" of a state.
Cities were condemned morally for their function of consumption
and politically for their breeding of change. For the agrarianist
ideologue, the first essential was to relax pro-urban practice, in part
by restraints on consumption, but most basically by removing the
samurai from the cities. This dochaku (return to the land) proposal
was first broached by Kumazawa Banzan (1619-91) in the 1670s, but
was most systematically argued by Ogyi Sorai (1666-1728), Japan's
first articulate urban ideologue, in his Seidan (Political Discourses,
c. 1727; see #19 and #20). Sorai saw life in the city as like "living in
an inn" (ryoshuku no kyokai), since all urban dwellers (but the
samurai in particular) were wholly dependent on money for survival,
down to "a single chopstick." "Living in an inn" thus represented a

life of dependence on merchants which was both demoralizing and
wasteful. Sorai did not propose, however, to eliminate the city; on
the contrary he affirmed it for its bureaucratic functions. With Sorai
as with all of the many dochaku advocates who followed him (de-
tailed in #19, pp. 350-8), cities were undesirable largely to the ex-
tent that they produced change: if consumption was maintained at
modest and fixed levels, cities were happily tolerated if never mor-
ally affirmed.
Tokugawa Urban Thought: The Chinin Viewpoint. Both "the

city as power" and "the city as corruption and change" were prod-
ucts of the bakuhan system and reflections of samurai class inter-
ests. At the same time, a variety of urban ideas emerged from within
the urban commoner class itself. None of these ideas harbored the
revolutionary potential of the Western concept of the free and inde-
pendent city (as in the title of "citoyen" in the French Revolution).
Yet they varied substantially in degree of potential subversiveness.
Beginning with the least subversive, I would propose four chonin
ideas of Edo:
1. A conservative and ascetic "popular morality" (tsfizoku
dotoku, a Meiji term), stressing the virtues of thrift, diligence, and
loyalty emerged as the fundamental ethic of the chonin elite during
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Shingaku (outlined in
#21) was the most articulate and successful of a variety of popular
movements stressing "this-worldly mysticism" (Bellah's phrase).
While consumption was criticized on moral grounds which were not
by accident consonant with the samurai ethic, profit (although not its
increment) was justified and affirmed-by analogy to the samurai
stipend. The existence of the city was affirmed, but its growth was
discouraged: the city of corruption and change was transposed to the
city of ascetic virtue and stability, with no essential difference in
frame of reference. While agrarianist in sentiment, it was essentially
a chonin ethic: I take this to be the symbolic sense of the title of the
major work of Shingaku founder Ishida Baigan (1685-1744), Tohi
mond6 (Dialogues of the capital and the country). While Baigan's
ideology was developed in Kyoto, it enjoyed phenomenal popularity
in Edo from the 1780's under the influence of Nakazawa Doni
(1725-1803).
2. An idea of the city as a family emerged naturally from the
system of chi administration, in which the landlords (finushi and
particularly their delegates, the 8ya) were conceived as parents and
the back-alley tenants (tanako) as their children. This hierarchical

but unifying conception was of course comparable to that of the
agricultural village, and as an idea it reemerged in the neighborhood
association movement of the twentieth century. It was not, how-
ever, an idea of the city as a whole, but rather one of the local
neighborhood, the "machi" or "ch3nai." It found literary expres-
sion in Shikitei Samba's (1776-1822) Ukiyoburo (1809-13) and
Ukiyodoko 1812-23) (as analyzed by Maeda, #23), and has survived
in modem Tokyo in rakugo story-telling.
3. A culture that combined an affirmation of consumption with a
spirit of impermanence survived and thrived in Edo, but only within
the carefully segregated ukiyo of the theatre and pleasure quarters.
Where the older native sensibility would tend to view such activity
in a temporal framework of purificatory play (hare) apart from the
everyday world (ke), the static Confucian worldview condemned it
morally within a spatial framework as the "akubasho" (literally,
"bad place"). This moral contradiction led to an idea of the city
apart from the city, two cities less in opposition than in different
worlds. The consequence was a culture of indirection and disguise,
relying primarily on wit, theatre, and antiquarianism for its modes of
expression. In this city of play, political criticism was possible and
indeed common, but tended to be neutralized by the fact of moral
isolation.
4. The most independent concept of the city to emerge from Edo
was that associated with the "Edokko" (child of Edo). Twentieth-
century mythology has greatly confused understanding of the
Edokko as he emerged in the late eighteenth century. Thanks to the
recent work of Nishiyama Matsunosuke (#22), it is now possible to
see the Edokko as representing the distinctive pride in Edo of
middle-level localists, particularly the brokers of hatamoto-gokenin
rice (the fudasashi) and merchants in fish and vegetables (perish-
able, hence local). The connection with bakfu retainers gave the
Edokko a particular pride in the city as political power (although of a
less privatized and more all-enclosing sort than that of the samurai
outlined above), while his tradesman function gave him pride in the
city as economic power: it was an idea of the city as prosperity,
revealed in such phrases as "O-Edo" and "Edo hanjo." Close con-
nections with the life of the akubasho, constant exposure to destru
tion by fire, and dealership in perishable goods-all these account
for the Edokko's proverbial contempt of stable wealth and his
affirmation of the pleasures of the moment. He thus presented a
conspicuous threat to the elite chinin ethic of thrift and diligence.
Yet the Edokko's pride in the city as a whole, both f

and political power, made him at best an ambivalent
bakufu's conception of Edo.
II. Restoration Tokyo: The City as a Showcase, 1868-1900
The transition from Edo to Tokyo traumatized the social and

economic structure of the city. The abolition of the sankin kotai
undercut the foundation of Edo's prosperity, and the transition to a
new political and economic base came slowly and after several false
starts; it was only in the 1890s that Tokyo recovered the population
of Edo at its peak. The indigenous Edo population, politically pas-
sive to begin with, was left disoriented and inarticulate, with a few
notable exceptions that I will mention below. During these three
decades, Tokyo as an idea was to be found among newcomers to the
city, both the new ruling elite from west Japan and the flood of rural
immigrants from all directions. The dominant concept of Tokyo was
as a passive entity. It was that of a showcase, on the one hand a sort
of two-dimensional back-drop against which the latest fashions and
inventions from the West were displayed, and on the other a
proving-ground for institutional innovations.
The administrative reform of the city was typical of this attitude.
For the first two decades of Meiji, Tokyo was subjected to one
system of government after another in confusing succession (see
#14). The final local government system of 1888 was revealing in
two respects as it applied to Tokyo. First, the new Tokyo City
(along with Osaka and Kyoto) was granted less autonomy than ordi-
nary cities through a special law (tokurei), abolished in the face of
local protests in 1898, that made the prefectural governor ex-officio
mayor of the city. Second, local municipal administration extended
only as far down as the new borough (ku), leaving unattended the
neighborhood level which had been so closely regulated in Edo. The
city was thus identified with the state at the top but left to its own
devices at the bottom, a pattern that remained characteristic until
the 1930s.
A grand plan for the building of a modern Western-style
downtown area in the nondescript merchant district known as the
Ginza, which had been gutted by fire in February 1872, revealed a
central component of the official idea of Tokyo as a showcase: the
hopes of impressing foreigners with the capital's modernity (see
#25). To the degree that the new quarter was to be fire-proof and
multi-storied, the plan was heir to late Tokugawa schemes to en-

hance the permanence of the capital. But the viewpoint of the for-
eigner was primary, as the location of the Ginza demonstrates, lead-
ing from Shimbashi to the south (where the foreigners got off the
train from Yokohama) to the Tsukiji Hotel to the east (where they
were lodged) and to the government offices to the west (where they
would negotiate revision of the unequal treaties). This Ginza Brick
Quarter plan was substantially scaled down in the course of its
execution, because it proved unpopular both with politicians and
with local residents. Yet the scheme remains testimony to a concep-
tion of the city as a showcase for foreigners which was not con-
ceived on as grand a scale until the face-lifting of Tokyo just before
the Olympic games of 1968.
But what of the native Japanese reaction to Tokyo of the 1870s?
One primary source of evidence is a genre of literature known as
hanjomono ("tales of prosperity") which detailed the wonders and
novelties of "civilization" in the capital. The prototype was Tokyo
shin hanjoki (A Chronicle of the New Prosperity in Tokyo, 1874-76;
see #26 and #27), a spicy description of customs in the city written
by Tohoku samurai Hattori Bush6, who had first gone to Tokyo in
1870 at age 29. Written in kambun and modeled after a late Edo
guide, the work focused on the new and curious, and set the tone of
wide-eyed journalistic wonder that characterized the several han-
jomono that followed (extending from Tokyo out to Yokohama,
Kyoto, and Osaka). Here again, the city was conceived as a show-
case, a backdrop for the pageant of bummei-kaika.
During the 1880s, the theme of planning Tokyo as a showpiece
for foreigners was revived despite the failure of the Ginza Brick
Quarter. The most monumental plan, for a vast government center
at Hibiya according to blueprints drawn up by German engineers in
1887, was abandoned (see Ishizuka, #8). But the same concern with
diplomacy can be discerned in the less ambitious and more practical
goals of the Municipal Improvement Act (Shiku kaisei j6rei) of 1888,
which was forced through by the government (over Genroin objec-
tions) on the grounds that the city must be presentable to foreigners.
Since foreigners were soon to be allowed freedom of residence, the
Municipal Improvement Act provided not for a monumental center,
but rather for the widening and paving of roads, improvement of
water supply, and dredging of rivers. Most such improvements were
of course a matter of practical urgency; but the dominant "idea"
behind the Municipal Improvement Act as a whole was that of
Haussman's Paris, the leading Western urban model for Tokyo at
the time: grand, permanent, and monumental. Despite the urgency

of treaty revisions it was not an idea that in itself inspired many
Japanese. As with the Ginza project, the Municipal Improvement
budgets became bogged down in politics and threatened by military
priorities, so that far less was built than planned (for details, see
#11).
The government emphasis in urban planning of the 1880s on
national political goals rather than practical economic ones was chal-
lenged by a small group of "urban modernizers." Chief among these
critics, all of whom stood outside the government, were Fukuzawa
Yukichi (1834-1901) and Taguchi Ukichi (1855-1905) (see #11, #14
[11/939-949], and #28). Taguchi was particularly vocal, his English-
style liberalism arousing a concern for the independent economic
strength of Tokyo, and leading him to stress above all the construc-
tion of a great international port-a plan which had government
supporters but was defeated by strong political opposition from
Yokohama. A critic in a different vein was Mori Ogai (1862-1922),
who on the basis of his public health training in Germany attacked
the inadequate hygienic provisions in the improvement plans (see
#13 and #29). What all these critics shared was a mechanical view
of the city, the city as a challenge to be met with modern technology
and practical learning. This was an attitude that fed directly into the
official city planning establishment of the 1920s.
In the 1890s, the dominant idea of Tokyo was as an object, to be
viewed from the outside. This sense is best captured by the word
"Teito" (imperial capital), an old Nara term which became popular
from about the time of the Meiji Constitution. "Teito" suggests a
Tokyo viewed less as a city than as a symbol of the nation. This is an
important shift from the idea of the miyako, which was a symbol of
the culture. While I have already suggested that some of the old
cultural affection of provincial Japan for the miyako may have been
carried over to Tokyo, the idea of "Teito" was nevertheless far
more saturated with political than with cultural connotations. Within
the domestic context, Tokyo represented "culture" in a new sense,
as the Westernized learning and manners necessary for risshin
shusse (making one's way in the world). Thus Tokyo as Teito re-
mained a passive tool, a means of achievement for the ambitious and
symbol of imperial power for the nation as a whole.
But what of the indigenous population of Tokyo, the most obvi-
ous potential for an active idea of the city? Least responsive was the
local merchant elite, bred in the passive ethic of frugality, diligence,
and filial loyalty. The disruption in early Meiji Tokyo obviously
threatened these values, but they provided no basis for an aggressive

and politically meaningful idea of the city. Furthermore, the decline
of Shingaku and other eclectic chonin religions, owing to early Meiji
government persecution, weakened the elite chonin system of belief
itself. Yet in broader perspective, Tokutomi Soh3's argument in
1888 that the old Tokugawa merchant elite (goyo shonin) was simply
too docile to provide any opposition to the Meiji state is persuasive.
In the end, Soho's own hopes for a "country gentleman" (inaka
shinshi) class to provide that function were also to be disappointed,
and Meiji Japan was left with no "citizen" class either in the city or
the country (see Kano, #30, for this interpretation).
Former bakufu retainers produced a slightly more spirited re-
sponse, stemming from their acute resentment of the "country
samurai" (inaka-zamurai) from West Japan who came carpetbag-
ging into Restoration Tokyo. The earliest such sentiment was ex-
pressed by Narushima Rydhoku (1837-1884), who in the second
volume (1874) of his Ryfiky6 shinshi (A New Chronicle of
Yanagibashi), a loving poetic description of the pleasure quarters of
the old city, lamented the damage wrought by the new immigrant
elite. Although his veiled attack on the illiberal policies of the Meiji
government led to his imprisonment in 1876 (see #24), in the end the
akubasho and its indirection (Ryuhoku wrote in Chinese and
criticized only by use of irony) offered little authority. In the late
1 880s, ex-bakufu retainers again rose in defense of Edo, but this time
in a purely antiquarian mode, with none of Ryihoku's irony. In a
series of magazines issued in the 1890s, such as Edo-kai shi or Kya-
bakufu (see Mizue, #10), these men offered nostalgic reminiscences
and reprinted sources on Edo history, but all in a sentimental spirit.
It was in the end the Edokko mentality of the middle-level chonin
class that produced the only outright critique of the Meiji govern-
ment's policy towards Tokyo, in novelist Koda Rohan's remarkable
essay "Ikkoku no shuto" (One Nation's Capital, 1898; #32). Ro-
han, of Edokko craftsman birth, was contemptuous above all of the
Satch6 country samurai who had no love for the city, but merely
used it for the advancement of personal ambitions. Rohan was at the
same time critical of conservative sentimentalists who longed for the
old Edo. One senses in him both the characteristic Edokko love of
the new, and an underlying protest against the conservative
moralism of both the merchant elite and the bakufu retainers.
Rohan's proposals were unique and radical. Rather than espous-
ing the show-case reforms of the government, he advocated a total
rebuilding of the city. His ideal was not a "Teito" but rather a
"Taito" (great capital). His emphasis was on high density, both of
wealth to make it prosper (reminiscent of "Edo hanj6" and similar

in ends to Taguchi's proposals), and of people and buildings to make
it stand apart from the country. He cited the cities of traditional
China and baroque Europe in support of this proposal, which had
virtually no precedent in Japan. He also borrowed techniques from
the West, notably the construction of multiple-unit, multi-storied,
fireproof apartments throughout the city. He likewise devoted atten-
tion to all sorts of urban conveniences, from cemeteries and sewers
to parks and barbers.
But Rohan's Edokko mentality, combining both an eagerness for
progressive change and a strong hostility to Satch6 statism and ch8-
nin conservatism, was unique and left no successors. By the turn of
the century, the leading idea of Tokyo remained that of the Teito
rather than "Taito."
III. Streetcar Tokyo: The City as a Problem, 1895-1923
It was only after the Sino-Japanese War that Toky6 passed the
peak population of Edo and began to metamorphose into a modern
metropolis. The population of the city doubled from 1895 to 1923,
reaching almost four million on the eve of the 1923 earthquake. Suc
explosive growth severely strained the already inadequate physica
systems of the city and disrupted patterns of urban space.
disrupted familiar patterns of urban space.
The symbol of this confusion was the electric streetcar, which
within two years from the autumn of 1903, when the first tracks wer
laid, had spread in a spidery maze of one hundred-odd miles over th
face of the city. The streetcars provided both the means of transpo
tation and a target of vengeance in the urban riots that typified this e
(anti-Portsmouth Treaty riots, 1905; anti-Katsura riots, 1912; Rice
Riots, 1918). The streetcar system itself was a constant political
problem, raising in succession protracted disputes over municipal
ownership, fare increases, and labor conditions. Particularly durin
the first decade of operation, the streetcar system was envisione
more as a threat than a convenience. Nagai Kafli depicted it in a
1912 story as a "black forest or doorless maze" (#42, p. 51; see also
pp. 33-34), while Natsume Sdseki in Higan sugi made of the sam
year presented an image of the streetcar-city as a puzzle to be solve
(see Maeda's analysis, #41). By the early 1920s, when they carried
well over one million passengers daily, the streetcars had been
largely absorbed into the daily life of the city; but until then, they
remained a powerful symbol of the problematic threat of change.
This uncertainty and confusion was reflected in the urban
thought of the era. Some writers proposed to solve the "problems"

of the city through reliance on the technology and institutions of the
West, others through a shoring up of traditional ethics; yet few
offered any interpretation of the modem city as a distinctive phe-
nomenon, remaining committed to a mechanistic and quantitative
frame of analysis. What remained distinctively Japanese was the
reluctance to negate the city outright; if unable to offer any creative
interpretations of the essential nature of the modem city, the think-
ers of these years nevertheless did not tend to flee from it, perhaps
suggesting an underlying idea of the city as "mediation."
The Anti-Urbanists. This period saw the emergence of an articu-
late agrarianist ideology that followed closely in the Tokugawa tradi-
tion. Even the most aggressive Nohonshugi advocates, of whom
Tokyo University of Agriculture Professor Yokoi Tokiyoshi (1860-
1927) was the prototype, tended thus to accept the city as a political
and administrative center, and to view the problem of agriculture
within a conceptual framework of city-country harmony (see #45,
Yokoi's major statement on the city). Like Ogyd Sorai two centuries
earlier, Yokoi differentiated country and city primarily in terms of
economic function: the country produced and the city consumed.
From these parameters follow naturally, in Confucian logic, the
ethical judgment of the city as conducive to luxury, insincerity,
selfishness, and crime. Yet Yokoi never conceived of any essential
antagonism of city and country: the city was not irredeemably im-
moral, but could be saved by regular interaction with the coun-
tryside.
Equally revealing was the pronounced ambivalence of the
Naturalist writers who came to constitute the mainstream of elite
literature in late Meiji Japan. They tended to be anti-urban in their
rejection of the decorative didacticism of late Edo literature and in
their susceptibility to Western romanticism. Even in their most
romantic depictions of nature, however, the city is often close at
hand-and rarely obtrusive. Typical is the classic essay Musashino
(1898, #33) of Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908), in which the author
suggests that the charm of the Musashi Plain west of Tokyo lies in its
unique pattern of alternating forest and settled area. Doppo agrees
with a friend that the fringe of the city as it dissolves into country is
particularly appealing-a clear expression of the city as mediation.
Among the later and more socially oriented novels of the
Naturalists, one also finds, as William Sibley has argued (#33, pp.
167-168), a strong ambivalence toward the city. While most such
novels are set in the country, reflecting the provincial origins of the
authors, their heroes are typically oppressed and isolated by rural

society, longing to escape to the metropolis as often as to nature.
Thus the hero of Shimazaki T6son's le (The Family; 1909), "though
he plays at farming and contemplates the scenery, easily gives up his
bucolic life to return to the crowded machi of the city." Perhaps it is
most accurate to argue, extending Okuno Takeo's theory about
more recent Japanese novelists (Bungaku ni okeru gen-ftikei,
Shileisha, 1972), that the Naturalists, being preoccupied with self
versus family and society, were not hostile to either country or city
in particular, but were rather generally lacking in any strong feeling
of specific "attachment to place" (chien).
Anti-urbanist ambivalence appeared most acutely in the ideology
of the "success" movement which began shortly after the turn of the
century. On the one hand, the fundamental utilitarianism of risshin
shusse led logically to an affirmation of Tokyo and its growth as the
mecca of opportunity for ambitious youth. Yet at the same time the
opportunism of the ethic encouraged affirmation of the orthodox
view of metropolitan life as a source of great spiritual danger. Par-
ticularly revealing is Tokyogaku, written in 1909 by one Ishikawa
Tengai (#40). Literally "Tokyo-ology," the title in effect implied
"How to Succeed in Tokyo," since most of the volume offered
detailed advice on the etiquette and techniques of ingratiation
needed for worldly advancement in the capital. Yet the introduction
warned that Tokyo was essentially a "battlefield" on which young
foot-soldiers from the country struggled for success under such gen-
erals as Iwasaki and Mitsui. The losses were tremendous; scarcely
two in a hundred survived. Even the survivors, Ishikawa warned,
should beware of remaining in Tokyo, since city-born people were
destined to mental deficiency after two generations. Utilize the city
for the education it offers, he advised, but then get out. (He admits
that he himself lingered on a bit.)
The Municipal Socialists. Socialists were the most vocal and
imaginative thinkers on Tokyo as a "problem" in the late Meiji
period. This concern was in one sense anomalous, for neither the
earlierjiya minken leaders nor later Marxists devoted any particular
attention to the city. More broadly, the municipal socialist ideas may
be seen as a link between such "urban modernizers" of the 1880s as
Taguchi Ukichi and Mori Ogai, and the bureaucratic city planning
movement of early Taisho: the common denominator was a moder-
ate utilitarian approach and a reliance on proven Western tech-
niques. Meiji socialist interest in the city was also a specific response
to one of the great public issues in the early twentieth century, that
of private versus municipal operation and ownership of such newly-

introduced modem utilities as gas, electricity, and streetcars. Par-
ticularly in Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka, this issue generated
much public debate and occasional mass demonstrations.
The concept of "municipal socialism" also related closely to the
specific experiences of its two leading theorists, Katayama Sen
(1859-1933) and Abe Isoo (1865-1949) (see #13 for an account of
their urban ideas). By different routes, both men ended up at
theological schools in the eastern United States (Katayama at Yale,
Abe at Hartford) in the early 1890s, where they were strongly
influenced by the progressive Christian interest in municipal reform
at the time. Both returned to Japan in 1896 (also coincidentally), and
proceeded to apply the lessons they had learned from American
(and, at one remove, English) municipal reform thinkers. Katayama
frequently wrote on urban issues (notably government, transporta-
tion, housing, and water supply) throughout the years from his re-
turn until 1913, and summed up his theories in Toshi shakaishugi
(Municipal Socialism, 1903) (#36), arguing for democratization of
Tokyo city government and for municipal ownership of all major
utilities.
Abe Isoo followed Katayama in introducing Western reform
movements (Oy6 shisei ron, 1908) and in stressing the need for
widespread municipal ownership of public conveniences, in Toshi
dokusen jigy6 ron (Municipal Monopoly of Utilities, 1911) (#37).
Abe went one radical step further than Katayama in proposing pub-
lic ownership of all urban land-indeed a revolutionary idea in Ja-
pan, where since the Tokugawa period urban land had been exempt
from major taxation. Yet this idea appeared in isolation and gener-
ated little interest. By the beginning of the Taisho period, mean-
while, the major issues of utilities management had been essentially
solved (typically by compromise) in Tokyo and other large cities.
The issue of the democratic reform of municipal government in the
direction of greater autonomy, which had also been of major con-
cern to Katayama and Abe, was to continue for three decades and
more, with the liberal position of the municipal socialists being up-
held by the Anglo-American style reformers of the Tokyo Institute
of Municipal Research.
The Bureaucratist Reformers. Throughout the Meiji period, the
call for modernizing and rationalizing Tokyo along utilitarian West-
ern lines had been limited largely to critics outside the government.
From early Taisho, however, a pervasive de-politicization of the
urban reform movement began, as bureaucrats and professionals
began to address themselves to the city as a prob

the Parisian model of rebuilding for monumental effect had been
abandoned for good in the wake of successful treaty revision and of
the mediocre results of the Municipal Improvement program in To-
kyo. The upshot of this new movement for efficient urban rebuilding
was the City Planning Law (Toshi keikaku ho) of 1919 and its sister
Urban Building Law (Shigaichi kenchikubutsu ho). (For details on
the drafting and operation of the City Planning Law, see #11, #48,
and #49.)
Unlike the 1888 Municipal Improvement Act which it replaced,
the City Planning Law of 1919 applied not only to Tokyo, but to all
metropolitan areas (at that time, the six cities of Tokyo, Yokohama,
Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe), revealing an important shift in
thinking from the -"capital" (teito) in particular to the " large city"7
(daitoshi) in general. By creating a new bureaucratic hierarchy, the
laws spawned much writing on municipal government and city plan-
ning in the 1920s. Particularly important in the early years were the
publications of the Urban Study Society (Toshi kenkyhkai), founded
in 1918 by Goto Shinpei (1857-1929), then Home Minister and the
pioneering figure in Japan's modern city planning movement. The
Society was composed largely of Home Ministry officials and soon
became a semi-satellite of the ministry's City Planning Section
(Bureau from 1922); its monthly Toshi koron (The Urban Review,
#51) remains the key source for bureaucratic thinking on prewar
city planning. Similar semiofficial organizations later appeared in
Osaka and Nagoya (#61, #62), both of which contributed vigorous
new initiatives in city planning in the 1920s; in particular Seki
Hajime (1873-1935), mayor of Osaka from 1923 until 1935, stands
out as an urban thinker in clear opposition to the centrist ideologues
of the Home Ministry (#57, #58).
As with their Meiji predecessors in the movement for urban
modernization, the city planners of the Taisho period turned almost
exclusively to the West for inspiration, drawing in particular on the
models of Germany, England, and the United States. Germany, as
the pioneer in the techniques of modern city planning (land read-
justment and zoning), was the natural model for the technical
framework of the 1919 City Planning Law. For ideological inspira-
tion, however, Japanese urban thinkers turned rather to the Anglo-
American tradition. English influence was most notable, in Japan as
elsewhere, for the idea of the Garden City, which however tended to
be interpreted in uniquely Japanese ways. One of the earliest intro-
ductions of the Garden City, for example, was by a group of Home
Ministry officials whose basic concern was not the building of new
medium-sized cities as Ebeneezer Howard had first proposed (To-
morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, 1898), but rather a charac-
teristic agrarianist "harmony" of city and country (#35). The only
actual "garden cities" built in Japan were in fact Tokyo suburban
developments, designed under the tutelage of aging urban modern-
izer Shibusawa Eiichi (1840-1931) (see Watanabe, #47 for details).
The only major prewar thinker in city planning who consistently
advocated the planned dispersal of large metropolitan concentra-
tions into small- and medium-sized cities was Home Ministry official
Jinuma Kazumi (#63). For most other urban thinkers, bigness as
such was not the problem of the big city.
It was the United States which in the end had the most powerful
ideological impact on Japanese urban reform thought. The closing
decades of the nineteenth century in America had seen the begin-
ning of what Robert Wiebe has called "the search for order" (in a
book of the same title, Hill and Wang, 1967), as a modern profes-
sional middle class emerged championing a new ideology of
bureaucratism. This ideology was particularly strong in the area of
municipal reform, where a revulsion over the abuses of boss-
dominated big-city politics was fused with a faith in social science as
an infallible tool for fathoming and serving the "public good." This
bureaucratist faith in a "scientific" approach to issues formerly
dominated by politics fell on fertile ground in Japan, where the pro-
longed political debate over municipal ownership had frustrated
many urban reformers and where bureaucratism, as Tetsuo Najita
has argued (Japan, Prentice-Hall, 1974; p. 5), had formed an "un-
derlying ideological consensus" since the Tokugawa period. As with
the English "garden city," fresh Western ideas offered happy
confirmation of established Japanese ideology.
This American influence, already evident in a high percentage of
translated books on urban issues, was vastly enhanced by the person
of Charles A. Beard, who visited Tokyo for six months from the fall
of 1922 at the invitation of Goto Shinpei-who was by then mayor of
Tokyo (for Beard in Japan, see #55). Beard, in addition to his better
known talents as a historian, was a dedicated municipal reformer
and former director of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research.
His final report on the reform of Tokyo appeared on the eve of the
Kanto earthquake (published in English in late 1923 as The Adminis-
tration and Politics of Tokyo, #56), a lucid and eminently rational
set of scientific proposals for the overhaul of Tokyo's inefficient
system of administration. Precisely for its neglect of cultural and
political variables, the report had a lasting impact on Japanese urban

thought, one which remains strong to this day.
Yet just beneath the surface of the happy consensus between
Beard and his bureaucratist hosts lay deep-rooted ideological as-
sumptions that were in fundamental conflict. The term "citizen," for
example, implied in the American tradition a realm of "public"
activity outside of the formal institutions of government, activity o
the sort typified by foundations like the New York Bureau of Munic-
ipal Research, and by philanthropists and private citizens like Beard
himself. The Japanese "shimin," however, tended to suggest a
hierarchical loyalty of urban residents to the city government, and
thence even to the state: thus the term was used as the title of a
nationalistic Min'yfisha tract in 1896 to mean something like "loyal
imperial subject" (#3 1). The term "autonomy" (jichi) in Japan simi-
larly implied a commitment to the national good, an idea reflecting
the Tokugawa concept that local governments performed certain
tasks out of dutiful loyalty to the state rather than as a local right.
This orthodox statist ideology in fact characterized the thinking of
most bureaucratist city planners, of whom the prototype was Ikeda
Hiroshi (1881-1939), author of the City Planning Law (see his writ-
ings, #52). While wholly dedicated to the cause of more systematic
and generous attention to urban problems, Ikeda and other officials
like him saw the issue as one of priorities within the national gov-
ernment rather than between the national and local governments.
To the degree that a firm ideological grasp of Anglo-American
urban ideas did survive in Japan, it is to be sought primarily among
the personnel of the Tokyo Institute of Municipal Research, estab-
lished in 1922 under the leadership of Goto Shinpei and with a grant
from zaibatsu leader Yasuda Zenjir6 (1838-1921). But Goto was a
bureaucrat rather than a private citizen, and Yasuda's motivations
seem to have been narrowly political, so that the "private" charac-
ter of the Institute was compromised from the start. Many of the
trustees were drawn from the ranks of the national bureaucracy, and
pressure for adherence to state guidelines increased noticeably in
the war years. Nevertheless, the Tokyo Institute of Municipal Re-
search, by virtue of its financial independence, was of critical impor-
tance as a bastion of liberal Anglo-American thinking on municipal
government and urban problems in the prewar period, and its many
publications (particularly the monthly Toshi mondai, #60) as well as
its complete library remain the major source of materials for the
study of the modern Japanese city (for details on the Institute, see
#54).
The theme of bureaucratism cannot be dismissed without special

reference to the thought of Got6 Shinpei, the pivotal figure in the
history of modem Japanese urban planning thought (for a brief ac-
count in English, see #50). While certainly the bureaucratist urban
modernizer par excellence, constantly commissioning scientific sur-
veys and proposing extravagant budgets for urban improvement,
Got6's urban thought had other dimensions. Reflecting his early
medical training, he insisted on a biological conception of the city,
an important contrast with the mechanistic thinking of most other
urban reformers and a fascinating parallel with his contemporary,
the Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes (1857-1932, author of Cities in
Evolution, 1915). Viewing the city (and the state) as an organism,
Gotd was hostile to mechanistic partisan politics (a hostility which
Yasuda had apparently hoped to compromise). Yet at the same time
Got6's writings reveal a parallel emphasis on a "spirit" of bushi-like
idealism, an emphasis which clearly qualifies his "scientific"
apoliticism. Hence Goto concluded a talk on "City Planning and the
Spirit of Autonomy" in 1922 (#53) by tracing the Japanese spirit of
"democracy" and municipal autonomy back to such paragons of
sincerity as Sugawara no Michizane and Kusunoki Masashige!
The Urban Moralists. Parallel with and often influencing the
utilitarian approach of the city planners were a variety of urban
improvement efforts along more traditional moralistic lines. While
largely uncoordinated, these various movements at both the national
and local level constituted what was in effect an "urban improve-
ment movement" not so different in its goals and means from the
official Local Improvement Movement that the Home Ministry de-
vised for rural Japan (for which see Pyle, #38). While varying in locus
of initiative and level of fervor, all of the three major types of partic-
ipants in this "movement"-social policy bureaucrats, moral educa-
tion propagandists, and neighborhood association organizers-were
in general agreement on the need to mobilize traditional values in an
effort to stave off the debilitating effects of modem urban change.
The most bureaucratic of the three approaches was that of the
social policy planners in the Home Ministry's new Social Affairs
Bureau (Shakaikyoku, 1918), which was soon complemented by
parallel organs in prefectural and municipal governments to deal
with specifically urban social problems (in Tokyo City, a
Shakaikyoku was established in December 1919). The "social
ects" (shakai jigyo) undertaken by these authorities included not
only charitable institutions such as orphanages and schools for the
handicapped, but also general social services such as markets,
health centers, employment services, and credit institutions (for To-

kyo, see #64). To the limited extent that housing policy was cov-
ered, the links with city planners were very close (see Akagi, #49).
But all were commonly rooted in the underlying ideology of "social
policy" as it had emerged from the thinking of the Social Policy
Association (Shakai seisaku gakkai, 1896-1925), a common front of
academics and bureaucrats modelled after a German group of the
same name and dedicated to staving off socialism through en-
lightened social reform. (For a provocative analysis of this school,
see Pyle, "Advantages of Followership," #38.) Although the As-
sociation was instrumental in the theoretical conception of the rural
improvement movement, the membership's concern with urban
problems-specifically, the labor problem-was even more basic.
Kuwata Kumaz6 (1868-1932), for example, wrote a long article in
1900 on "Municipal Social Policy" (#34), arguing that "since the
city is the center of the labor problem, municipal social policy
should occupy the lead in all social policy" (p. 80)-an argument
revealingly parallel to that of Katayama Sen in the same years for
"municipal socialism." Kuwata outlined various institutions for an
urban social policy, most of which would in fact be undertaken by
Tokyo City in the 1920s-albeit on a generally modest scale.
Separate from the evolution of a bureaucratic social policy for
cities in these years was an overtly ideological campaign to combat
the extravagance and selfishness for which Confucian orthodoxy had
long condemned the city. The initiative came largely from the Home
and Education Ministries, but was eagerly supplemented by the
Education Associations (Kyoikukai, semi-official groups of local
educators) of Tokyo Prefecture and Tokyo City. The campaign,
which has been traced in rich detail by Yamamoto Tsuneo (#39),
began as early as 1902, but was escalated first after the 1908 Edict
(Boshin sh6sho, the so-called "thrift and diligence rescript") and
then following the K6toku Incident of 1910. This "urban moral edu-
cation" (toshi kyoka) movement ranged from extensive programs of
public lectures to the encouragement of popular entertainment (both
traditional yose and the new cinema) as channels for the inculcation
of thrift, diligence, and loyalty to both city and nation.
It would be misleading, however, to overemphasize such efforts
at didactic "popular education" (tsfizoku kyoiku) from above. It is
doubtful first of all that the movement was at all effective, particu-
larly considering its small scale relative to the total population of
Tokyo. More importantly, as a few critics of the campaign argued
(#39, p. 17), popular belief in early twentieth-century Tokyo was
still so strongly colored by the didactic moralism of Edo culture that

any such campaign was like carrying coals to Newcastle. It is also
well to recall that late Meiji and Taisho Tokyo witnessed a substan-
tial growth in popular religious movements, ranging from Chris-
tianity and Okada Meditation for intellectuals to Tenrikyo and
Nichiren for ordinary people. On the whole it would seem that far
more moralizing came spontaneously from within the lower and par-
ticularly middle levels of Tokyo culture than the Home and Educa-
tion Ministries could ever hope to infuse from above.
The most dramatic evidence of the internal potential of Tokyo
culture for mobilizing traditional moral sentiment was the phenom-
enal growth of neighborhood organizations (chonaikai) in this period
(see #14, IV:268-292 for a good secondary analysis, and #66 for a
primary survey). Wholly spontaneous organizations at the ch8 level,
the chonaikai rose in number from a mere 39 in 1897 to 452 on the
eve of the Kanto earthquake, by which time about half the city was
organized (the other half following quickly in the decade after the
earthquake). While diverse in organization, the chonaikai were es-
sentially a means of sustaining local community solidarity in the face
of rapid population turnover. While clearly drawing on the tradition
of chM autonomy in Edo, the chonaikai were distinctly modem in
their contractual nature, relying on written charters and voluntary
participation (although in fact few refused to pay the dues).
Two characteristics stand out in the ideology of the chonaikai as
seen in their charters of these years (#65). First and least surprising
was a strong emphasis on cooperativism, mutual aid, and friendship
within the neighborhood-a clear reflection of the familial urban
neighborhood ethic of the Edo period. At the same time one finds a
strong identification with the nation, not only in such specific func-
tions as behind-the-lines support of military activities (a clear legacy
of the Russo-Japanese war effort), but more broadly in the rhetoric
of the charters, which encourage "reverence for the kokutai,"
" 'providing the foundation of a healthy nation," and " displaying the
true character of the Japanese people by adhering to the Imperial
Rescript on Education and the 1908 Edict." It is no surprise that the
chonaikai offered virtually no resistance to incorporation into the
formal administrative apparatus of the state in the 1930s-indeed,
many local leaders had been seeking such recognition for years.
Yet the fact remains that the chonaikai were created from below,
with the primary initiative coming from local merchants. What
emerges here is not an idea of Tokyo as a whole: despite efforts by
city officials to propagandize the idea of Tokyo City as a whole as a
"family" with "City Hall as the housekeeper" (#39, p. 225), in fact

"Tokyo" provided only the weakest conceptual link between neigh-
borhood and state. The city of the chonaikai was thus an amorphous
assortment of neighborhood units founded, as Tawara Motoaki has
argued (#14, p. 280), in a spirit of solidarity (seiitsu) rather than of
independence (jiyti), looking at once vertically to the state and hori-
zontally to the community.
The Medievalists. The decade of the 1910s saw a variety of reac-
tions against both the materialistic modernizing and the traditionalist
moralizing of the trends outlined above. At the most elemental level,
there arose a new wave of nostalgia for old Edo in an antiquarian
mode, relishing the rapidly disappearing past for its own sake (see
Mizue, #10, for a bibliography). It was in 1910 that Mitamura Engyo
(1870-1952), son of a bakufu retainer, launched his prolific career in
the chronicling of Edo history and customs (collected in #44), and in
1920 that Yada Soun (1882-1961) began serializing in the HMchi
shinbun his place-by-place encyclopedia of local urban lore, "Edo
kara Tokyo e" , to continue until the earthquake (#46). Unlike those
who reminisced of Edo in the 1890s, this generation was notable for
its post-1868 birth and consequent lack of any direct knowledge
of Edo.
Distinct from the antiquarians was a diverse group of writers and
artists whom architectural historian Hasegawa Takashi, in his pro-
vocative cultural history of the 1910s, Toshi kair6 (The urban cor-
ridor, #43), has tagged "medievalists." These men shared a hostil-
ity toward Meiji Japan for its classicism, monumentalism, weighti-
ness, moralizing, anti-individualism, utilitarianism, and above all its
rusticity. They were men of the city, urbane and cosmopolitan,
drawing with equal facility on Japanese tradition and on such diverse
Western medievalist sources as Art Nouveau, Post-Impressionism,
and utopian anarchism. They dominated the elite culture of pre-
earthquake Taisho Tokyo, but defy easy categorization in terms of
urban ideas. Let me oversimplify by proposing two basic styles,
those of the Shirakaba-ha and the Pan-no-kai.
The Shirakaba-ha (1910-23) was in its underlying sensibilities
quintessentially urban, drawing at once on an aristocratic sense of
urbane refinement (the founding members all being Peers School
graduates) and on a certain bourgeois liberal commitment to indi-
vidual freedom. Yet it was precisely this individualism that forced
the members to reject, if only subconsciously, the nascent trends of
commercialization and massification in Taisho Tokyo. Under the
influence of Tolstoy, leading Shirakaba-ha members tended to reject
the city in favor of a utopian vision of primit

the clearest expression was the "New Village" (Atarashiki mura)
movement of Shirakaba-ha founder Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885-
1976). They thus reflected an anti-urban ambivalence not so differ-
ent from the Naturalists against whom they rebelled.
Of more positive relevance to Tokyo as an idea was the Pan-no-
kai (1908-12), a group of writers that took its name from afin de
siecle German literary clique. Far less properly bourgeois than the
Shirakaba-ha, the Pan-no-kai aestheticists were organized not
around a monthly magazine, but around monthly parties at restau-
rants by the rivers of Tokyo (Hasegawa's "urban corridors"). The
group included as an occasional member Nagai Kaffi, a few years
senior to the rest, whose writings provide the most sensual and
concrete idea of Tokyo of any modem author, an idea which has
been developed in masterful detail by Edward Seidensticker (#42).
Yet in the end, Kafri's Tokyo was really Edo, and his urban litera-
ture a passionate and enduring affirmation of the disappearing city of
wood and water.
It was rather the younger founding members of the Pan-no-kai
who sought to combine old Edo with modem Tokyo. Unlike KafO,
they did not turn to Edo directly, but ironically through the media-
tion of late nineteenth century Western artists. The sensibility of the
group is expressed in a 1910 poem by Kitahara Hakushfi (1885-
1942), which opens with the title of Whistler's celebrated painting of
Battersea Bridge (itself inspired by an early Hiroshige print of
Nihonbashi): "Nocturne in blue and gold/Duet of spring and
summer / In young Tokyo a song of Edo / Both shadows and light
within my soul" (#43, p. 55). One senses here a lyricism that fuses
the new and the old in a distinctly modem sensual appreciation
of the city as it exists at the moment. This sensibility continued in
the late 1920s, but largely cut adrift from the living memory of Edo,
which was to be snuffed out by the Great Kanto Earthquake.
IV. Post-Earthquake Tokyo: The City as Modern Life, 1923-

1937
The mid-day earthquake of September 1, 1923 destroyed much

old Tokyo and led in turn to broad changes in the patterns of
Japanese thought about the city. It was only a handful of intellectu-
als who responded to the disaster with nihilistic despair or nostalgia
for the past; most greeted the ruined city rather in a much older
spirit, with a fleeting sense of Buddhistic resignation and an even
stronger spirit of renewal and affirmation of the present (I rely here

and in my following argument on Minami, #68). The city was rebuilt
rapidly and haphazardly, to the distress of the infant profession of
city planning and its leader Got6 Shinpei (for details, see #11 and
#48). The city as a "problem" scarcely disappeared; on the con-
trary, the problems of both physical and social planning were
exacerbated by continued population growth and chronic economic
depression (see #67 for some details). Both moralists and techno-
crats redoubled their efforts in all of the modes previously described;
yet such efforts tended to become segmented and routinized, no
longer attracting attention as ideas. Both morals and politics seemed
of little relevance in the wake of the earthquake, and it was rather a
new concept, that of "modem life"-and more basically, of "life"
(seikatsu)-which came to dominate discussions of the city and its
future.
To the extent that "modem life" designated an environment
filled with the customs and machines of industrial civilization, post-
earthquake Tokyo bears a certain resemblance to early Meiji Tokyo.
"Modem life" was pronounced modan raifu as often as kindai
seikatsu, and critics were quick to point out the pervasive
Western-particularly American-cultural influence. Yet this super-
ficial similarity to bummei-kaika Tokyo belies an essential contrast:
whereas earlier "civilization" was viewed as alien and curiously out
of place, the new customs and technologies of the 1920s were per-
ceived as emerging naturally from within Japan's growing industrial
economy. The city was no longer a "showcase" for novelties from
abroad, but rather itself a powerhouse of innovation, as suggested,
for example, in a 1931 photo-essay in Chfi7 koron entitled "The
Character of Great Tokyo" (#75), which is saturated with images of
machine power and production. The older agrarianist conception of
the city as passive and parasitic was broadly challenged for the first
time.
The change was reflected also in the response to new modes of
machine conveyance that transformed the shape and tempo of post-
earthquake Tokyo. Literature in the late 1920s reveals little of the
fright and confusion that the introduction of the electric streetcar had
inspired two decades earlier. People rather seemed now to be com-
fortable with machines, and the city itself acquired a sense of or-
ganic movement in which people and machines both blended and
blurred into a unified kinetic landscape. By the late 1920s, streetcars
seemed almost a Meiji antique in the face of new high-speed elevated
lines, which with their vastly increased capacity created the new
phenomenon of the "rush hour." Buses and taxis multiplied like

rabbits in the decade of cheap gasoline after 1927, and even a sub-
way was opened in 1926. Urban dwellers themselves became more
physically active, as a craze for sports and dancing swept the city.
The city as "modem life" evolved in two realms, that of the
home and that of the streets-both products of the new-middle-class
consumerism that underlay this new idea of the city. The "modem
home," revealed best in such women's magazines as Shufu no tomo
or Fujin koron, involved not only the artifacts of the "cultured life"
(bunka seikatsu) of the suburban new middle class (electric fans,
radios, overstuffed chairs) but also a new ethic for the acquisition of
such conveniences, an ethic that might be called "conscientious
consumerism." While stressing the familiar chonin virtues of thrift
and diligence, this ethic placed primary emphasis on rational plan-
ning for individual convenience. The home of "modem life" was
typically separated both from extended family and from place of
work, and less inclined to active neighborhood involvement than the
traditional chonin home; yet as an idea it never implied the sort of
anti-urban sentiment and commitment to the nuclear family that one
finds in American suburban ideology. The home as "modem life" in
post-earthquake Tokyo had rather the effect of affirming the city, in
that it involved a sense of permanent settlement. It is from these
years that one can speak of the "Tdkydjin" (Tokyoite, in distinction
to the traditional Edokko), committed to the city as a way of life and
taking a positive interest in feathering the urban nest.
The other realm of "modem life" was that of the sakariba (liter-
ally, "thriving place"), the popular centers of entertainment and
shopping that took shape in these years. The sakariba differed from
the old akubasho of Edo in that they were unregulated, open to
anyone (including, increasingly, women), and located at the centers or
sub-centers of the city rather than segregated on the fringes. The
sakariba became the centers of the many innovations associated
with "modem life": dance halls, movie theatres, neon lights, de-
partment stores, flappers, and dating. The sakariba as an idea, how-
ever, as seen in the frequent sketches of "modem life" in the
magazines and newspapers of the late 1920's, was complex, and
involved at least three different components.
The first was itself the most "modem," the view that the life in
the sakariba represented nihilistic escapism in the face of mounting
unemployment and economic hardship during the depression. This
essentially economic interpretation reflected the growing influence
of Marxism among Japanese intellectuals, and was presented in its
most characteristic form in a brief article in 1929

(1900-1970) in Chaa koron entitled "The Modem Phenomenon and
the Modem Class" (#73). Oya saw "modan" behavior as a reflec-
tion of the economic dilemma of the urban new middle class, particu-
larly the growing unemployment among recent college graduates.
This created an "intellectual proletariat" addicted to the fleeting
pleasures of the sakariba, which offered "sensations without feel-
ings, stimuli without excitement, todays without tomorrows." This
interpretation, which was not without overtones of Confucian
moralism, dominated the journalistic critiques of "modem life" in
the years 1928-31, and tended to focus on the Ginza as the sakariba
par excellence, the avant-garde of modernism and the quintessential
city as escapism. The classic description of the Ginza in this vein
was Andd Kdsei's Ginza Saiken (Pleasure Guide to the Ginza, 1930,
#76).
A second and at first sight more traditionalist sense of the
sakariba was conveyed best in a novella of Kawabata Yasunari
(1901-1973) of 1930 entitled "Asakusa kurenaidan" (The Asakusa
Crimson Gang, #71). Reflecting a strongly surviving Edo commoner
character, the Asakusa of Kawabata's novel has a certain mystical,
hidden quality. It is in a sense the city as a trickster, showing itself in
shifting and contrasting guises. The young shitamachi youth in the
Crimson Gang are similarly unstable, metamorphosing from one
calling and guise to another in a manner reminiscent of Edo theatre.
Yet it is at the same time a very different city from that of Kafa,
since it exists wholly in the moment and is freely accepting of mod-
ern change. In fact, Kawabata's descriptions of the physical city ring
with a sensuous appreciation of the hard, cutting qualities of the
steel and concrete that identified reconstructed Tokyo, an aesthetic
that echoes the imagery of sharpness in the Edokko-like bravura of
the gang members themselves.
The third conception of the "modern life" in the streets was that
of the city as ordinary life, as depicted for example in a short sketch
of the Shinjuku area in 1929 by modernist writer Rydtanji Yui
(1901- ) (#72). Shinjuku was an appropriate choice for an "ordi-
nary" conception of the city, a newly emerging area of bars,
theatres, and department stores around a major rail terminal on the
western edge of the city, with neither the class of Ginza nor the
traditional mystique of Asakusa. "The hue of daily life is deeper
than that of pleasure" in Shinjuku, where waves of commuters in-
undate the rush hour platforms, suburban housewives don incon-
gruous fox stoles for midday shopping, and an endless variety of
restaurants offer second-rate food at cut-rate prices. If nothing is

fine or special, neither is anything pathological in this ordinary
place: the phlegm on the side-walk is free of tuberculosis. Such
homely images add up, Ryotanji concludes, to "a vortex of modem
city life."
This feel for the city as ordinary life was conveyed also in the
technique of "modernology" developed by a young Waseda ar-
chitecture instructor named Kon Wajiro (1888-1973) in the years
after the earthquake. Kon, drawing on the techniques of the rural
folklore movement of Yanagita Kunio and aided by a number of
colleagues and students, set out to record in minute detail the pat-
terns of everyday behavior in Tokyo. Kon christened his new disci-
pline "kogengaku" (replacing the ko 'old' of kokogaku "archaeol-
ogy" with gen 'contemporary'), for which he provided an Esperanto
coinage "Modernologio" (#74). Using both drawings and text, the
modernologists traced the course of a young middle-class housewife
browsing in a department store, enumerated every worldly posses-
sion of a shitamachi day-laborer, analyzed the successive changes in
leg position of a seated cafe waitress, and mapped the sites of
suicides in Inokashira Park. While "modernology" did not in fact
develop into an academic discipline, it suggested an idea of the city
as an amalgam of diverse patterns of ordinary life. In a sense, it
brought the idea of "modem life" back close to the idea of the
"home", and it is no coincidence that Kon himself moved on to the
systematic study of home economics (kaseigaku) in the 1930's.
It was more in this anthropological spirit of Kon than along the
economic lines of the journalistic critics that one finds the beginnings
of the academic study of the contemporary city in Japan by Okui
Fukutaro (1897-1965). Although in fact a professor of economics (at
Keio University), Okui used a sociological approach to the city,
influenced primarily by the Chicago school of Park and Burgess.
Synthesized in his voluminous Gendai daitoshi ron (The Modern
Metropolis, 1940; #78), Okui's studies began in about 1932 and
focused on evolving spatial patterns of life and customs in Tokyo-
including, for example, a study of the sakariba. The term that Okui
most commonly used to describe the object of his study was "phe-
nomenon" (gensh6), suggesting an increasingly experiential con-
ception of the city-a revealing contrast to the idea of the city as a
problem.
Indeed, one is struck by the general absence in the decade after
the earthquake of any strongly hostile analysis of the modern city in
Japan. The apocalyptic anti-urbanism of Oswald Spengler (The De-
dine of the West, 1918-22), for example, had only the slightest
influence. Spengler's general thesis was introduced from an early
date by journalist Murobuse K6shin (1889- ) in Bummei no bo-
tsuraku (The Fall of Civilization, 1923) and Tsuchi ni kaere! (Return
to the Earth, 1924) (#59); yet these simplistic volumes attracted no
following. It was only in the writings in the mid-1930s of such a
radical agrarianist as Tachibana K6sabur6 (#77) that Spengler was
to find a more authentic spokesman in Japan; yet even then, anti-
urbanism was less a matter of belief in the impending collapse of the
city than a conventional attack on the city as the source of the
increasing misery in the Japanese countryside.
More characteristic of Japanese anti-urbanist thought in these
years and in many ways a highly modem analysis of the city was
Yanagita Kunio's insightful Toshi to noson (City and Village, 1929,
#69; see also lesaka's analysis, #70). Yanagita was interested in
city "life" not in the sense of customs (as with Kon Wajiro) nor of
"phenomena" (as with Okui Fukutar6), but rather in the sense of
the term as- used by Louis Wirth in his classic 1938 essay on "Ur-
banism as a Way of Life" (#15), to indicate a characteristic pattern
of human relations. Yanagita's observations on the transitory and
segmental nature of social relations in the city are in fact very close
to Wirth's analysis. Nevertheless, Yanagita stopped well short of
the generally bleak "ideal type" of urban life suggested by Wirth.
For Yanagita, as for many generations of Japanese urban thinkers
before him, the city was neither an idea nor an ideal, but rather a real
place for 'mediation" which would always retain its harmony and
interdependence with the less densely settled world around it.
Epilogue: Wartime Tokyo, 1931-1945
During the war, the city largely disappeared as an idea in Japan.

The city as "modern life" vanished in the early 1930s, the victim of
mounting ideological suppression of individualism and consum-
erism. Politically, the movement for greater autonomy for Tokyo
reached an anti-climax in 1943 when the long-awaited Tokyo Me-
tropolis (Tokyo-to) was created, repairing the irrational separation of
Tokyo Prefecture and Tokyo City. Yet far from enjoying greater
autonomy, as reform advocates had long urged, the new Tokyo
Metropolis was even more closely controlled by the national gov-
emnment than in the past. Similarly at the lower administrative levels
of Tokyo, the chonaikai which had emerged spontaneously since the
late Meiji period were now formally incorporated into the state
hierarchy, and then further divided into the ton

wartime control. Hence both at the highest and lowest levels, Tokyo
lost much of its political identity.
The field of city planning saw a similar sublimation of the city,
first into regional planning and then into national planning (see #9
for a bibliography). The various books written in this field were not
of the de-centralizing Anglo-American tradition, but rather of the
totalitarian Nazi and Soviet lineages. Perhaps the most provocative
of these was Kokudo keikaku (National Planning, 1943; #79), by
Ishikawa Hideaki (1893-1955), a leading city planner who proposed
a hierarchical scheme based on modules called "spheres of living"
(seikatsuken) as the basis for national planning. But here again, the
city as such was dissolved into the nation. Planning for the city itself
was focused almost exclusively on the overbearing problem of air-
raid defense. It was ironically in the spring of 1945, the season of the
great fire-bomb raids that laid Tokyo to waste, that Tokyo Institute
of Technology Professor Tanabe Heigaku put the finishing touches
on his definitive Funen toshi (Fireproof city, #80). The book was
actually published on August 15, an irony only heightened by the
zeal with which Tokyoites set out to rebuild the city in the same old
dense, wooden pattern.
The postwar decades have seen urban thought, together with the
city itself, rise again like the phoenix from the ashes. While many
new ideas of the city have emerged, few of the older ones have
completely disappeared, however outdated they may seem. My
hope is that this rough outline may provide a tentative framework for
sorting out the current tangle of urban ideas in Japan as well as for
analyzing modern Japanese society in general.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The study of the city as an idea in Japan has begun only very
Nishikawa Koji's analysis of urban thought in Tokugawa Japan (#
pioneering work in the field. For modern Japan, Nishiyama Uzd and
Yoshino Masaharu (in #9) provide a very useful historiographical essay on
the literature of city planning, but little monographic work has been done
yet. (Two exceptions are #48 and #49.) A study group on the history of
Japanese city planning (Toshi keikaku shi kenkyiikai) has been active since
1976 under the leadership of Watanabe Shun'ichi (see #47) at Tokyo Uni-
versity; most of the group's activity until now has focused on the compila-
tion of bibliography, but monographic research is to be expected over the

next few years. The theme of the city in modem Japanese literature has
been recently developed in a provocative series of articles by Maeda Ai of
Rikky6 University (#24, 27, 41). In a similar vein, but stressing architecture
more than literature, is Hasegawa Takashi's Toshi kair5 (#43).
I. Some Useful Bibliographies
1. Nihon toshi keikaku gakkai. Toshi keikaku bunken mokuroku. Edit

1969. A bibliography of Japanese-language works on city planning, includ-
ing journal articles.
2. Shinkenchiku, ed. "Nihon kindai kenchikushi saik6-Kenchiku ron-
bun, chosho 101." Shinkenchiku, October 1974, pp. 85-98. A useful bibliog-
raphy of over two hundred sources (about one-third books, the rest articles)
for the history of modem Japanese architecture, of which a number are
relevant to urban thought.
3. T6kyo toritsu daigaku, Toshi kenky0 soshiki iinkai, ed. Toshi kenky0
kankei bunken mokuroku. 1971 and 1973 editions. These two editions are
complementary; both are indexed by author and title.
4. Tokyo toritsu daigaku, Toshi kenkyu soshiki iinkai, ed. Toshi-shi,
toshi keikaku-shi kenkyai bunken mokuroku-Nihon hen. Editor, 1971, Most-
ly periodical articles, since late Meiji.
5. T6kyo shisei chosakai, Shuto kenkyuijo, ed. Tikyo ni kansuru bunken
mokuroku. Editor, 1964. A thorough bibliography of Tokyo-related articles
located in the Tokyo Institute of Municipal Research library; includes both
books and articles.
II. General Works
6. Barasch, Moshe. "The City." The Dictionary of the History of Ideas.

Scribner's, 1968, I, 427-434.
7. Havens, Thomas. Farm and Nation in Modern Japan: Agrarian Na-
tionalism, 1870-1940. Princeton University Press, 1974.
8. Ishizuka Hiromichi. "Meiji-ki ni okeru toshi keikaku-T6ky6 ni
tsuite." In Tokyo toritsu daigaku, Toshi kenkyukai, ed., Toshi k5zo to toshi
keikaku, Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1968; pp. 481-98.
9. Kono Yoshikatsu, ed. Toshi jichi gakusetsu shi gaisetsu. Tokyo
shisei chosakai, 1962. A valuable collection of historiographical and theoret-
ical essays on municipal administration, city planning, and local autonomy.
Particularly useful is the prewar historiography of Japanese city planning
thought by Nishiyama Uzo and Yoshino Masaharu, pp. 99-129.
10. Mizue Renko. Edo shichut keiseishi no kenkyu. Kobundo, 1977. The
introduction (pp. 1-67) provides a useful discussion of the modern his-
toriography of the premodern Japanese city, particularly Edo.
11. Nihon kenchiku gakkai, ed. Kindai Nihon kenchiku-gaku hatta-
tsushi. Maruzen, 1972. Part VI (pp. 975-1134) provides a good general ac-
count of the history of city planning in modern Japan.
12. Schorske, Carl E. "The Idea of the City in European Thought:
Voltaire to Spengler." In Oscar Handlin and John Burchard, eds., The
Historian and the City, MIT Press, 1963: pp. 95-114.
13. Shibata Tokue. "Nihon no toshi mondai". In Tokyo toritsu daigaku,
Toshi kenkyukai, ed., Toshi koz& to toshi keikaku, Tokyo daigaku shuppan-
kai, 1968; pp. 199-226. Focuses on Mori Ogai, Katayama Sen, and Abe
Isoo.
14. Tokyo-to, ed. Tokyo hyakunen shi. 6 vols. Editor, 1972-77. The
official history of Tokyo; vast, unindexed, uneven, and indispensable.
15. Wirth, Louis. "Urbanism as a Way of Life." In Richard Sennett,
ed., Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1969; pp. 143-164. The original was published in 1938.
III. Selected Sources on Japanese Urban Thought
(The following list is in rough chronological order, with secondary works

listed in order of period treated rather than date of publication. All of these
works are referred to in the text above.)
16. Nitschke, Gunter. "Shime: Binding/Unbinding." Architectural De-
sign, 44 (1974), pp. 747-91.
17. Pelzel, John. "Human Nature in the Japanese Myths." In Albert
Craig and Donald Shively, eds., Personality in Japanese History, Univer-
sity of California Press, 1970.
18. Kamo no Chomei, "An Account of My Hut" (Hojoki). In Donald
Keene, ed., Anthology of Japanese Literature, Grove Press, 1955; pp.
197-212. Written in 1212.
19. Nishikawa Koji. Nihon toshi shi kenkya. NHK, 1962. Part III,
"Kinsei toshi ron no keisei to hatten," pp. 293-442, is an excellent detailed
analysis of Tokugawa urban thought.
20. McEwan, John. The Political Writings of Ogyui Sorai. Cambridge
University Press, 1962. Includes a translation of much of Seidan (c. 1727),
Sorai's key work with respect to the city.
21. Bellah, Robert. Tokugawa Religion-The Values of Pre-Industrial
Japan. The Free Press, 1957. Includes a brief study of Shingaku, a major
urban religion in the Tokugawa period.
22. Nishiyama Matsunosuke, ed. Edo chonin no kenkyui. 4 vols.
Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1972-75. Vols. II (pp. 1-93) and III (pp. 1-27) are
studies of the Edokko by Nishiyama.
23. Maeda Ai. "Toshi kikan no naka no bungaku." Tenb5, no. 223
(July 1977), pp. 70-88. An analysis of the spatial structure of Edo as re-
vealed in late Tokugawa literature.
24. Maeda Ai. Narushima Ryuihoku. Asahi shimbunsha, 1976. Ch. 7
deals with Rydhoku's Ryfiky5 shinshi and its suppression.
Smith: Japan-ese Urban Thought 77
25. Tokyo-to. Ginza rengagai no kensetsu. (Tokyo-to shi kiyo, vol. III).
1965.
26. Endo Shizuo, ed. Hyakunen mae no Tokyo ffizoku tanb5. Gakugei
shorin, 1976. A translation from kanbun, with notes and commentary, of
Hattori BushO (Seiichi), Tokyo shin hanjoki, 1874-76.
27. Maeda Ai, "Kaika no panorama-toshi kukan no naka no bun-
gaku." Tenb5, no. 226 (October 1977), pp. 32-46. An analysis of Hattori,
Tokyo shin hanjoki (#26).
28. Teiken Taguchi Ukichi zenshti kankokai, ed. Teiken Taguchi Ukichi
zenshfi. Oshima Hideo, 1928. Vol. V contains Taguchi's proposals for To-
kyo, especially pp. 9(-102, 164-174, 183-193.
29. Mori Ogai, Ogai zenshu. Iwanami shoten, 1927. Vol. XVIII contains
Ogai's writings on urban hygiene and housing, 1888-91, pp. 235-301, 346-
382.
30. Kano Masanao. Meiji no shiso. Chikuma shobo, 1964. See Ch. 9 for
an analysis of the urban implications of Tokutomi Soho's concept of the
inaka shinshi.
31. Shimin. Min'yusha, 1895. A highly nationalistic tract, revealing of
the use of "shimin" to indicate loyalty to the nation rather than the city.
32. Koda Rohan. "Ikkoku no shuto." Rohan zenshui. Iwanami shoten,
1954. Vol. XXVII, pp. 3-168. Original, 1898.
33. Kunikida Doppo. Musashino. 1898. Available in several contempo-
rary editions. For a discussion of the later work of the Naturalists, with
specific mention of their attitude toward the city, see William F. Sibley,
"Naturalism in Japanese Literature," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies,
vol. 28 (1968), pp. 157-169.
34. Kuwata Kumazo. "Toshi no shakai seisaku." In Kuwata Kazuo,
ed., Kuwata Kumazo ikoshui, Editor, 1934; pp. 16-82. The original essay
appeared in Kokka gakkai zasshi, September 1900.
35. Naimusho chihokyoku yushi. Den'en toshi. Hakubunkan, 1907. In-
troduces not only the English garden city, but a wide range of Western
housing and social welfare projects.
36. Katayama Sen. Toshi shakaishugi. Shakaishugi toshobu, 1903. Re-
print edition, Jitsugyo no Nihonsha, 1949.
37. Abe Iso. Oyo shisei ron. Hidaka Yurindo, 1908; Toshi dokusenjigyo
ron. Ryubunkaku, 1911.
38. Pyle, Kenneth. "The Technology of Japanese Nationalism: The
Local Improvement Movement, 1900-1918." Journal of Asian Studies, 33/1
(November 1973), pp. 51-65; and "Advantages of Followership: German
Economics and Japanese Bureaucrats, 1890-1925." Journal of Japanese
Studies, I/1 (Autumn 1974), pp. 127-164.
39. Yamamoto Tsuneo. Kindai Nihon toshi kyoka shi kenkyfi. Nagoya:
Reimei shobo, 1972.
40. Ishikawa Tengai. Tokyogaku. Ikuseikai, 1909.
41. Maeda Ai. "Misuterii to shite no toshi-Higan sugi made o
megutte." Gendai shi techo, 25/5 (May 1977), pp. 56-66.
42. Seidensticker, Edward. Kaffi the Scribbler-The Life and Writings

of Nagai Kafli, 1879-1959. Stanford University Press, 1965.
43. Hasegawa Takashi. Toshi kair5-Aruiwia kenchiku no chiiseishugi.
Sagami shobo, 1975.
44. Mori Jdzo et al, eds. Mitamura Engyo zenshii. 24 vols. Chfl6 koron
sha, 1976.
45. Dai Nihon n6kai, ed. Yokoi hakushi zenshfi. 10 vols. Yokoi zenshO
kank6kai, 1925. Includes Tokai to inaka (original Seibido shoten, 1913) in
vol. IV, pp. 533-651. For a discussion of Yokoi's thought, see Havens, #7,
pp. 98-110.
46. Yada Soun. Edo kara Tokyo e. S vols. Saikensha, 1953. Also avail-
able in six-volume edition, Haga shoten, 1964-66. Originally serialized in
Hochi shinbun, 1920-23.
47. Watanabe Shun'ichi. "Garden City Japanese Style: The Case of
Garden City Co., Ltd., 1918-1928." Unpubl. paper presented at First Inter-
national Conference on the History of Urban and Regional Planning, Lon-
don, September 1977.
48. Fukuoka Toshiharu. "Taish6ki no toshi seisaku-Juitaku, toshi
keikaku koso no tenkai." Tokyo toritsu daigaku hogakkai zasshi, 11/2
(March 1971) pp. 243-297; 12/1 (October 1971) pp. 219-272; and 13/1 (Oc-
tober 1972) pp. 1-81. An account of the evolution of Japan's modem city
planning policy in the Taisho period.
49. Akagi Suruki. "Toshi keikaku no keikakusei." In Tokyo toritsu
daigaku, Toshi kenkyukai, ed., Toshi koz5 to toshi keikaku, T6kyo daigaku
shuppankai, 1968; pp. 499-566. Deals with some of the theoretical problems
of early city planning thought in Japan.
50. Hayase Yukiko. "The Career of Goto Shinpei-Japan's Statesman
of Research, 1857-1929." PhD dissertation, Florida State University, 1974.
See especially Ch. VIII, "Goto and Tokyo," pp. 179-199.
51. Toshi koron. Monthly, 1918-1943. Published by the Toshi ken-
kyukai. A key source for prewar city planning thought.
52. Ikeda Hiroshi. Ikeda Hiroshi toshiron shu. Ikeda Hiroshi ik6shui
kankokai, 1940. A good starting point for Ikeda's extensive writings on the
city, including a short biography and bibliography. Of his early books, the
most important are Gendai toshi no yokyui (Toshi kenkyuikai, 1919) and
Toshi keieiron (Toshi kenky0kai, 1922; rev. ed., 1924).
53. Goto Shinpei. "Toshi keikaku to jichi no seishin." In Toshi ken-
kyukai, ed. Toshi keikaka koshtiroku zenshui. 2 vols. (Editor, 1922). Vol. I,
31 pp. A lecture originally delivered in the fall of 1921; a representative
example of Goto's many statements on city planning.
54. Tokyo shisei chosakai, ed. Tokyo shisei chosakai yonji-nen shi.
Editor, 1962. The official history of the Tokyo Institute of Municipal Re-
search, founded in 1922. Includes a bibliography of the Institute's publica-
tions.
55. Tokyo shisei chosakai, ed. Charles A. Beard. (In Japanese). Editor,
1968. An anthology of analyses and reminiscences of Beard in Japan.
56. Beard, Charles A. The AdminTistration and Politics of Tokyo-A

Survey and Opinions. New York: MacMillan, 1923.
57. Seki Hajime. Toshi seisaku no riron to jissai. Sanseid6, 1936; post-
war reprint with annotations: Toshi mondai kenkyuikai, 1966. A posthu-
mous collection of Seki's writings on the city, with a short biography. Seki's
major book was Jfltaku mondai to toshi keikaku (K6bundoshobo, 1923).
58. Shibamura Atsuki. "Seki Hajime ni okeru toshi seisaku no re-
kishiteki igi." In Osaka rekishi gakkai, ed. Kindai Osaka no rekishiteki
tenkai. Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1976; pp. 297-456. Seki's urban thinking in
the context of the history of Osaka.
59. Murobuse K6shin. Bummei no botsuraku. Chdseido, 1923; Tsuchi ni
kaere! Chdseido, 1924.
60. Toshi mondai. Monthly, 1925-present. Published by the Tokyo
shisei chosakai. The major source of thinking on municipal government and
urban problems in prewar Japan.
61. Dai Osaka. Monthly, 1925-1942. Published by the Osaka toshi ken-
kyfukai.
62. Toshi slsaku. Monthly, 1925- . Published by a group affiliated
with the Aichi Prefecture City Planning Bureau in Nagoya.
63. linuma Kazumi. Toshi keikaku no riron to hosei. Ryosho Fukyikai,
1927. Parts of this work are included in a recent anthology of linuma's
writings, Toshi no rinen (Shin ho shiko kinen jigyo iinkai, 1969).
64. Tokyo shi, Shakaikyoku. Tvkyo shi shakaijigy& y5ran. Annual from
the mid-1920's. Annual reports on social programs of Tokyo City.
65. Tokyo shi, Shakaikyoku, Shakai kyoiku ka. Chokai kiyaku yory5.
(Shakai ky6iku s6sho, IV.) Rev. ed., 1925. A collection of chnaikai chart-
ers.
66. TOkyO shisei chosakai. TJkyJ shi chJnaikai ni kansuru chosa. Au-
thor, 1927. A report on Tokyo's chonaikai based on a 1925 survey.
67. Downard, Douglas J. Tokyo: The Depression Years. PhD disserta-
tion, Indiana University. June, 1976.
68. Minami Hiroshi, ed. Shakai shinri shi-Showa jidai o megutte.
Seishin shobo, 1965. An interpretation of urban culture in the, 1920 s and
1930's.
69. Yanagita Kunio. Teihon Yanagita Kunio shfi. Chikuma shobo, 1962.
Vol. XVI includes Yanagita's writings relating to the city, especially Toshi
to noson (original 1929), pp. 239-391; for an analysis of these writings, see
Iesaka, #70.
70. Iesaka Kazuyuki. "Yanagita Kunio no toshiron." In Kamishima
Jiro, ed., Yanagita Kunio kenkyli, Chikuma shobo, 1973; pp. 307-339.
71. Kaizosha, ed. Gendai Nihon bungaku zensha, Vol. LXI: "Shinko
geijutsu-ha bungaku shii." Editor, 1931. A collection of writings by the
leading modernist group of the late 1920's. Includes Kawabata Yasunari's
Asakusa kurenaidan (1929-30) and Ryotanji Yu's HMrO idai (1928).
72. Ryotanji YI. 'Shinjuku suketchi."' Kaizo- 11/4 (April 1929), pp.
64-69.
73. Oya S6ichi. Modan so to modan so. Taih6kaku shob6, 1930. The
title essay, on pp. 3-6, originally appeared in Chuio koron in February 1929.
74. Kon Wajiro. Kon Wajir& shu, Vol. I: "Kdgengaku." Domesu shup-
pan, 1971. An anthology of studies in "modernology" by Kon and others,
drawn largely from Modernologio-Kogengaku (Shun'yod, 1930) and
Kogengaku saishui (Kensetsusha, 1931).
75. "Dai Tokyo no seikaku." Chuio koron, 46/10 (October 1931). A
photo-essay, part of a special supplement to the issue.
76. Ando K6sei. Ginza saiken. Shun'yodd, 1931.
77. Tachibana K6sabur6. Kodo kokka nohon kenkoku ron. Kenset-
susha, 1935. See Havens, #7, p. 256, for a discussion.
78. Okui Fukutaro. Gendai daitoshi ron. Yuihikaku, 1940. For a post-
humous anthology of Okui's writings on the city, including biography and
commentary, see Nihon toshi kenkyiikai, ed. Toshi no seishin-Seikatsuron
teki bunseki. NHK, 1975.
79. Ishikawa Hideaki (Eiyo). Kokudo keikaku-Seikatsuken no sekkei.
Kawade shobo, 1942.
80. Tanabe Heigaku. Funen toshi. Kawade shobo, 1945.

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The Society for Japanese Studies

Tokyo as an Idea: An Exploration of Japanese Urban Thought until 1945

explain the underlying structure of Japanese urban thought in terms

I. The Structure of Traditional Urban Thought

Traditional urban thought in Japan may be understood as two

Ancient Attitudes Toward the City. The older; implicit approach

affirms multiplicity and simultaneity of function rather than a di-

Tokugawa Urban Thought: The Samurai Viewpoint. The upper

moner district of the city, and even most of t

down to "a single chopstick." "Living in an inn" thus represented a

Tokugawa Urban Thought: The Chinin Viewpoint. Both "the

the back-alley tenants (tanako) as their children. This hierarchical

Yet the Edokko's pride in the city as a whole, both f

II. Restoration Tokyo: The City as a Showcase, 1868-1900

The transition from Edo to Tokyo traumatized the social and

multi-storied, the plan was heir to late Tokugawa schemes to en-

the time: grand, permanent, and monumental. Despite the urgency

threatened these values, but they provided no basis for an aggressive

wealth to make it prosper (reminiscent of "Edo hanj6" and similar

III. Streetcar Tokyo: The City as a Problem, 1895-1923

thought of the era. Some writers proposed to solve the "problems"

authors, their heroes are typically oppressed and isolated by rural

of private versus municipal operation and ownership of such newly-

began to address themselves to the city as a prob

political variables, the report had a lasting impact on Japanese urban

The theme of bureaucratism cannot be dismissed without special

health centers, employment services, and credit institutions (for To-

still so strongly colored by the didactic moralism of Edo culture that

"family" with "City Hall as the housekeeper" (#39, p. 225), in fact

the city in favor of a utopian vision of primit

IV. Post-Earthquake Tokyo: The City as Modern Life, 1923-

The mid-day earthquake of September 1, 1923 destroyed much

stronger spirit of renewal and affirmation of the present (I rely here

phenomenon of the "rush hour." Buses and taxis multiplied like

most characteristic form in a brief article in 1929

restaurants offer second-rate food at cut-rate prices. If nothing is

Epilogue: Wartime Tokyo, 1931-1945

During the war, the city largely disappeared as an idea in Japan.

hierarchy, and then further divided into the ton

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

tion of bibliography, but monographic research is to be expected over the

I. Some Useful Bibliographies

1. Nihon toshi keikaku gakkai. Toshi keikaku bunken mokuroku. Edit

II. General Works

6. Barasch, Moshe. "The City." The Dictionary of the History of Ideas.

III. Selected Sources on Japanese Urban Thought

(The following list is in rough chronological order, with secondary works

42. Seidensticker, Edward. Kaffi the Scribbler-The Life and Writings

56. Beard, Charles A. The AdminTistration and Politics of Tokyo-A

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