Geography and the Studies of Modern Urban History

It is becoming very popular among disciplines in the human and social sciences to stress the spatial aspects of the historical development of cities. In particular, studies of urban history in Japan within the fields of architecture, town planning, and Japanese history have been progressing remarkably along with academic advancement related to the general discussions of urban studies or especially those of cosmopolitan Tokyo and Edo. This paper tries mainly to make some reviews of the existing accumulation of studies of Japanese urban history from the spatial viewpoint after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Considering the geographical contribution to these academic fields, geographers have been, generally speaking, ignorant of the importance of this kind of studies. The author points out several perspectives which can be rearranged as a new set of questions in geography, such as the discussion of the technology of the construction of urban space, ideas of the creation of urban space, planning perspectives, who planned, who realized the projects; and also refers to studies of urban development and town planning which placed value on the political and social context. In the Meiji era, because of a lack of rules and acts of regulating and creating urban space except for urban improvement ordinance exclusively for Tokyo of 1889, municipal governments had concentrated on their investment by addressing municipal bonds toward the anticipated future of developing economic sectors such as the construction of streetcars (including widening streets), harbor, and provision of electricity and gas which were managed as municipal enterprise. This establishment of municipal enterprises brings forth many discussions about the financial and political question of who ruled and managed cities. They also constructed streets with streetcar service taking opportunity of the opening of the exposition under the initiative of some influential local entrepreuners. In the next stage of the Taisho era, a real sense of urban politics emerged which was mixed with social welfare, housing and town planning politics or legislation. Some opinion leaders proposed a Japanese version of imported urban politics, and helped a lot to enforce the town planning act of 1919 or so. Actually, the initiative of large municipal governments led to the realization of many projects such as slum clearance, the provision of public housing and many facilities of social welfare. Among them, the reconstruction works after the Kanto Great Earthquake of 1923 were the biggest project of redevelopment of the existing built-up areas by use of land readjustment. This technique of land readjustment was widely adopted by many cities, and played the most important role of developing suburban areas. In Wartime, especially after the outbreak of Chinese-Japanese War in 1937, a strong bureaucracy of the central government emerged in the field of urban, regional and industrial development, which helped the proceeding of war. By the aid of newly developed technical manuals of, for example, constructing new towns or collective housing estates, standardized techniques of construction of urban built environment had been established, and there later became basic in inplementing the nationwide postwar reconstruction works of war damaged cities. Concerning the question the initiative of urban planning projects, significant change had occurred during wartime. In particular, the Ministry of Public Welfare (established in 1938) retreated from the management of housing provision, and instead, the Ministry of Construction Works dominated most of the urban planning section after World War II. This implies the separation and the retreat of welfare and labor administration from urban planning, so that engineers in the Ministry of Construction Works played a central role in carrying out various urban planning projects afterward.