Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young

a crisis situation. Though the crowd’s methods may have been extreme and alarming, the press tended to portray the cause of the rioters as just. The third message conveyed by the newspaper coverage of the rioting concerned the rioters’ political significance. Unable to get results through established political channels, the crowd took matters into its own hands, entering into direct negotiations with local businessmen to seek relief from starvation. In this way the crowd created its own form of political action and its own rules of political ethics. This signaled the growing power of the disenfranchised to express their will through extraparliamentary means and rendered the town hall momentarily irrelevant. Finally, the photographs of battered houses and smashed up warehouses telegraphed to urban elites the message that they ignored the demands of the lower classes at their own peril. If not met with a good-faith effort, the crowd was capable of exacting a high price on the wealthiest and most powerful members of the community. The local police force offered no guarantee of safety.

      The denouement to the drama of the rice riots came in the fall of 1918, when the newspapers reported the results of police investigations and the outcome of the trials of those arrested. Here the central focus of the press was the social background of the rioters, highlighting the principal role played by the urban working poor. Although historians such as Michael Lewis have stressed the socially heterogeneous composition of the crowd, journalists at the time judged participants to be “poor” (saimin) or “the lower classes” (kasō shakai).³⁴ Later reports reinforced such impressions. In Kanazawa, five of the seven arrested were foil workers—a category of craftsmen who pounded gold and silver foil for inlay in religious accouterments, lacquerware, and other traditional craft products. Since Kanazawa was a center of the foil industry, foil workers comprised a large percentage of local craftspeople that, together with day laborers, small tradesmen, and workers in small factories, were among the poorest paid of urban workers and most vulnerable to rice price inflation. The other two arrested were a secondhand goods merchant and a day laborer.³⁵

      In Okayama, where a much higher number of arrests reflected the greater scale and violence of local protests, 177 were eventually prosecuted in connection with the riots. Of these, 53 were unskilled “coolie” and day laborers, 35 were craftsmen, and 36 were small tradesmen. Striking in their absence from the list were workers from Okayama’s abundant textile factories, reinforcing the impression that the rioters came not from the better-paid aristocracy of large-factory labor but from the underclass of working poor. Moreover, with headlines like “Peremptory Demands of Poor Burakumin Terrorize Rice Merchants” (August 20) and “Armed with Bamboo Spears, Burakumin Riot Attacks the Wealthy” (August 22), San’yō shinpō reports underscored the dominant presence of the former outcasts known as burakumin among the protesters, further strengthening the image of a crowd composed of marginal peoples—the poorest of the poor, the most socially debased, and the most economically disadvantaged.³⁶ These marginal elements of urban society suffered the most from the volatility of the modern urban economy, and their sense of disaffection could be dangerously transformed into violent rage. Images of new forms of urban wealth and poverty that circulated during the war boom suggested that if narikin were the beneficiaries of economic growth, these were its victims. Occupying the extremities of the new social unevenness produced by urban capitalism, the violent gestures of the crowd, no less than the conspicuous consumption of the narikin, dramatized the new social face of the city.

      The economic boom of World War One left its mark on Japanese cities of all sizes and identified urban space as one of capitalism’s new frontiers. Urban growth transformed both material realities of urban life and the way people thought about urban economy and society. The city emerged as a powerful symbol of the modern economy, illustrating the hopes and fears of what industrial growth might promise for the future. The ongoing construction boom appeared to bear out the modernist dictum of creative destruction and destructive creation. In the dizzying pace of change, urban development followed the emerging imperative to clear out the old and make way for the new. Amid the social upheaval triggered by the disruptions of the war years, the twin symbols of the narikin and the urban crowd seemed to distill the social possibilities offered by urban growth. Unprecedented wealth and unprecedented poverty, the potential for a paradise of riches as well as for insurrection and revolution—the possibilities made visible by the war years inspired a host of utopian and distopian meditations on modernity in the years that followed. If the war years taught people that change could come quickly, without warning, and with awesome force, they also raised the potential of harnessing and directing this power to control the future.

      In these ways the tumultuous experience of World War One contributed to the emergence of a new social imaginary that refigured the city as a social, economic, and cultural space. As we shall see, the war prompted an extended historical moment of intensive reflection on the significance of recent change and gave rise to a new social consciousness of the modern. This social imaginary situated cities at the center of modern life and at the vanguard of national progress, leaving behind the social world of the countryside. Uneven development gave rise to new economic and cultural geographies that concentrated wealth and power in cities and subordinated the provinces to the metropolis. Cities became sites of a distinctive temporality, where time sped along and the minutes ticked by faster. Contemplating the dynamism of the interwar years, urban elites determined that cities represented the point where the forces driving modernization seemed to converge in both space and time.

      These changes cumulatively defined an identity for the city that was grounded in the conceptual fusing of modernity with the urban form. Although the identification of the city with modernity appears to be common sense today, the conviction that “city = modern” is in fact a historical product. To retrace the genesis of this belief, in the pages that follow I ask the question: How did the city become the center of modern economic and social life? One answer can be found by examining the forces that made Tokyo into a “world city” and center of the Japanese empire while simultaneously producing new lines of division between “city” and “country.” The first part of this book, to which we now turn, tracks the development of the cultural and economic geographies that defined the social space of “modernity” through the creation of a new system of centers and peripheries.

      PART TWO

      Geo-Power and Urban-Centrism

      TWO

      The Ideology of the Metropolis

      One of the most striking effects of Japan’s modernization project of the late nineteenth century was the rising prominence and increasing centrality of Tokyo within the new national space. By the 1920s, Meiji government policies of national developmentalism pursued since the 1870s had built Tokyo up and transformed it into the control room for nationwide political parties, the seat of national government and apex of administrative hierarchies, the clearinghouse for the financial industry, the heart of the national transportation grid, a locus of industry and a major concentration of population, and the main portal to the outside world. These policies increased Tokyo’s centrality in cultural ways as well, as it became a center of higher education, the high arts, the publishing industry, and the mass media.

      In a material sense, these economic, political, and cultural institutions and networks concentrated power and resources in the capital, producing and reproducing its centrality. But just as significant, people came to think of Tokyo as the first among cities: they believed it to be the largest, the best, the foremost, the fastest, the most advanced. And because nothing succeeds like success, this faith in Tokyo as number one augmented the capital’s capacity to attract still more economic, cultural, and political resources. In other words, belief in Tokyo as the center had a power-effect, which reinforced and reproduced its centrality. It is this combination of material and ideological forces that I highlight by the term Tokyo-centrism.

      Intellectuals, the literati in particular, stood at the heart of this process. Literary production in the early twentieth century was concerned, overwhelmingly, with everyday life. Because their depictions of life in the metropolis, in the provincial town, and in the rural village critically shaped urban and rural imaginaries, writers occupied a central role in the production of Tokyo-centrism. Moreover, faith in Tokyo’s centrality was most fervently felt in high cultural circles. For writers, artists, and musicians, the metropolitan stage represented a singular pinnacle of achievement.