The land readjustment techniques of Japan

A report prepared by the European Economic Community (EEC) a few years ago described the Japanese life-style as that of “urban workaholics living in rabbit huts”. In fact, there seem to be a number of foreigners who, an their first visit to Japan, are struck with the unattractive outlook of the average residential quarters in metropolitan areas, an outlook which does not quite match Japan’s image of affluence represented by her high GNP, or multifarious industrial products of excellent quality. Understandably, there is an implicit assumption that good products are bound to be produced by people whose living environment is also good. However, such an assumption is not always borne out, particularly in the case of Japan. It is important to understand that Japanese industry has been able to thrive not in spite of but because of such living conditions, which are certainly poor compared with those in other industrialised nations. In other words, one of the major factors in accounting for the prosperity of the Japanese economy is that her people have opted to tolerate, rightly or wrongly, a meagre resource allocation for their living conditions, thereby leaving the maximum amount of resources for industrial development. Meanwhile, one should recognise that the vigorous economic development of Japan in the last hundred years or so has been concomitant with her torrential urbanisation, particularly in the decades since World War II. Japan took only half as long as Britain to metamorphose from a predominantly agricultural into a viable industrialised nation.’ The process has caused a tremendous demand for serviced urban land in major metropolitan regions for both residential and industrial uses including both the secondary and tertiary sectors. It would be fair to say that it is almost solely Kukakuseiri, or the Land Readjustment (herinafter LR) that effectively worked as a systematic device for urban land development in Japan. In fact, urban land development under LR has invariably constituted no less than half of the annual urban land supply throughout the last two decades or so,* and eventually amounting to as large as one-third of the entire DID3 in the country (about 10,000 sq. km). In the case of