Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young

University, with its premier agricultural research facilities and wide range of high cultural activities, provided a strong intellectual coloration for the Sapporo middle class.

      In Okayama, located along the Pacific corridor close to Kobe and Osaka, the war boom expanded factory production in what was, by 1914, an already industrial city. Economic growth intensified tensions between a large and growing working class and a powerful and increasingly organized business community. Such tensions expressed themselves in citizen’s rallies and other forms of popular protest that became familiar elements of local politics well before the war. Even so, when skyrocketing food prices and rice shortages touched off rioting throughout the country in 1918, the scope and violence of local protests shocked the city. Conditions that caused barely a ripple in Sapporo provided a flashpoint for Okayama’s politically organized working class. As May Day demonstrations, labor strikes, antiprostitution rallies, and other forms of mass protest followed closely on the heels of the rice riots, Okayama became known as a hotbed of political and social activism and a center of the Taishō democracy movement.

      A coastal city and former seat of feudal government, Kanazawa resembled Okayama in many respects. Both cities were proud of their castle town heritage and their traditions of scholarship and artisan crafts. Yet Kanazawa, situated along what had become Japan’s “back side,” experienced difficulty attracting capital for new industrial ventures. Instead, the city focused on reconstituting its traditional industries—lacquerware, gold inlay, and embroidered fabric. Local entrepreneurs turned remoteness into a selling point, investing in hot springs resorts in the nearby mountains and advertising the city’s virtues as a tourist spot. Marketing itself as a city of crafts for the modern age and promoting its old world charm, local boosters turned “tradition” into a Kanazawa trademark.

      While Niigata shared with Kanazawa the misfortune of location on Japan’s back coast, the long-standing centrality of the port to the urban economy provided an adaptable resource for local development. This legacy helped Niigata secure the distinction of becoming one of the five open ports granted trading privileges in 1858. Although the benefits of this coup did not live up to expectations, fortune smiled on Niigata again when the Meiji government anointed the city as the seat of prefectural government in the new administrative order. As Niigata’s experience reveals, however, political privilege does not necessarily trump geographic disadvantage. The city often lost out in the competition for resources and investment in the early years of state-led development. Even so, the town fathers pinned their hopes on the potential of the port, investing heavily in a variety of improvements in the teens and twenties that expanded capacity and improved the city’s connection with the national rail grid. Niigata’s importance as a transit point increased dramatically during the World War One boom, but the city hit pay dirt in the 1930s, when the invasion of China and the creation of the yen block in Japanese-occupied Asia turned the back coast into a gateway to the new Asian empire.

      Diverse local conditions meant that policies of national development and the World War One boom affected individual cities in very different ways. As the stories of these four cities illustrate, there was no such thing as a typical small town in modern Japan. Indeed, the myth of the typical small town is itself a product of this moment in urban history, when Tokyo-centrism and the mystique of the hometown became core elements of social ideology. In choosing these particular cities as case studies, I make no claim that they represent some larger sample of regional or other urban types. Although all four are second-tier cities and prefectural capitals, not only their commonalities but also their idiosyncrasies stand out—the serendipitous and conjunctural forces that shaped their particular historical trajectories. As their diverse stories tell us, there is no single master narrative of twentieth-century modernization; nor is there a standard account for the metropolis and an alternative time line for every other place. Just as the Kanazawa story yields important insights into the particularities of the Tokyo case, a case study of Iowa City can force a rethinking of the place of New York in American history. Instead of conceiving of provincial cities or even Japan itself as an example of some kind of alternative modernity, I suggest in this book ways that the so-called standard-bearers of the modern are themselves outliers and exceptions.

      The divergences in the local experience of national development and global capitalism were expressed in the character of libraries and archives, among other places. Embarking on the research for this book, I quickly discovered that historical records are strikingly uneven, and that what one city archive possesses in abundance is nowhere to be found in another. Niigata offered a surplus of guides to local businesses but few arts magazines. Sapporo presented a gold mine of literati journals but little on the local-history movement. Kanazawa lovingly preserved manuscripts penned by local writers, but documents on local politics were harder to come by. As I eventually realized, such gaps provided clues in themselves, helping me to focus on significant variations in the four stories of urban modernization.

      In the tracks of the provincial city, I draw on such materials as yearbooks, chamber of commerce records, company histories, social surveys and reports, tourist guides and travel diaries, local magazines and newspapers, city plans, and memoir literature. These sources document the World War One boom and the transformation of urban life in Sapporo as well as the 1918 rice riots and images of an insurrectionary lumpen proletariat in Okayama. They tell the story of Niigata’s department stores, Okayama’s sports teams, and Kanazawa’s community of artists and writers. All these regional cultures of modernity referenced and borrowed from Tokyo models and were inevitably shaped by the prodigious cultural power of the metropolis. But they were also part of a much larger network of cultural production that branched out in all directions, connecting Kanazawa to its own peripheries, Niigata to the Asian continent, Sapporo to its neighboring cities, and Okayama to the Kansai urban complex of Kyoto, Kobe, and Osaka. By engaging urban culture beyond the metropolis, this study shows that Japanese modernity was not simply made in Tokyo and exported to the provinces. Rather it was coconstituted through the dynamic interaction of provincial cities with the capital, as well as through the circulation and exchange of people and ideas throughout the country.

      THE CITY AS SUBJECT

      This book approaches the modern city from two conceptual vantage points. First, I envision the city as a constellation of institutions—government bureaucracies, factories, schools, department stores, and radio stations among them—that create the material contours of the city. They define its territorial boundaries and structure its social life. They provide the foundation for the economy, channel political action, and mediate the relationship between the local residents and the social world outside the city limits. I also look at the city as a set of ideas—a social imaginary, to borrow Cornelius Castoriadis’s phrase.⁸ For me this means the intellectual field upon which people projected their beliefs about the city. The imaginary domain of the city housed residents’ expectations for urban life and their sense of belonging to an urban community—what they thought it meant to be “urban.” By using the term social imaginary, I want to convey the open-ended, creative element in the urbanist social thought of these years—its utopian and dystopian moods, the succession of thought experiments that recast urban worlds.

      These two dimensions of the city—as a matrix of ideas and as a socio-institutional network—came together through the actions of the individuals who inhabited the city. The key questions that emerge here concern the human actors who occupy the center of my story: How did urban residents respond to the nationalizing and globalizing forces reshaping their world? How did their actions help construct a community of shared interests, beliefs, and ideals—to produce, in other words, a modern urban subject? In their provocative book on social theory, Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry Ortner point out that the organization of space and time structures everyday life and individual consciousness. In this sense the space-time of the modern city is built on the relationship between material structures, ideology, and action: “The organization of space (in homes, in villages, in cities) and time (the rhythms of work, leisure, holidays) embody the assumptions of gender, age, and social hierarchy upon which a particular way of life is built. As the actor grows up, lives everyday life within these spatial and temporal forms, s/he comes to embody those assumptions, literally and figuratively. The affect is one of near total naturalization of the social order, the forging of homologies between personal identification and social classification.”⁹

      As