Reconstructing the Japanese Dream:

MIURA Atsushi

doi:10.20592/jaeg.70.1_58

<p> In every age, the Tokyo metropolitan area has seen an influx of young people from all over Japan. There are more unmarried women and women having children in the city center than in new towns in the suburbs, which were once built to accommodate families raising children. However, the small area of the city center alone cannot absorb all the families raising children. It is also necessary to make the suburbs available for families in the child-rearing years. Suburbs should not be a town only for housewives, but a place where both men and women, as well as the elderly, live and work in the suburbs. Suburban new towns are artificial cities conceived in the 1960s with extremely modernist, future-oriented values and a division of labor based on gender roles. Life in Newtown was a lifestyle based on the belief that one could become affluent by consuming the new products that were being produced one after another. Sixty years have passed since then, however, and times have clearly changed. It is often said that “New Town has become Old Town,” but a town where people can live together, from children in their bellies to 100 year olds, as well as people with disabilities and those who need nursing care, is a good town. Of course, from the perspective of the SDGs, if there is a new town where people can live without buying even a few new products, this is the kind of new “sustainable town” that we should aim for in the future. A sustainable suburb where young and old, men and women, and people with disabilities can all live, work, and shop together, and not just buy shiny new products. This is not the suburbs as a Japanese dream that merely imitates the American dream of the past, but a reconstruction of it.</p>

Reconstructing the Japanese Dream:

Bibliographic Information

Search this article

Description

Journal

Keywords

Details 詳細情報について

Export

Report a problem