Rebuilding Urban Japan After 1945


Book Description

This is the first book in English to examine the reconstruction of Japan's bombed cities after World War II. Five case studies (of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Osaka, Okinawa, and Nagaoka) are framed by broader essays on the evolution of Japanese planning and architecture, Japan's urban policies in Manchuria and comparisons between Japanese and European reconstruction.




Reconstructing Kobe


Book Description

The Hanshin Earthquake was the largest disaster to affect postwar Japan and one of the most destructive postwar natural disasters to strike a developed country. Although the media focused on the disaster's immediate effects, the long-term reconstruction efforts have gone largely unexplored. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, David Edgington records the first ten years of reconstruction and recovery and asks whether planners successfully exploited opportunities to make a more sustainable and disaster-proof city. This book is an intricate investigation of one of the largest redevelopment projects in recent memory.




Living Cities in Japan


Book Description

Over the last fifteen years local citizens' movements have spread rapidly throughout Japan. This volume examines the growth and nature of civil society participation in local urban and environmental governance.




Brewed in Japan


Book Description

Although Japan’s beer industry dates back nearly 145 years, to date there has been no English-language source documenting its origins, growth, and evolution. Spanning the earliest attempts to brew beer to the recent popularity of local craft brews, Brewed in Japan explores beer’s steady rise to become today’s “beverage of the masses.” Alexander sheds light on the advent of Western-style taverns and beer gardens, the control of beer production by Japan’s Ministry of Finance during the Second World War, the rapid rise in women’s beer consumption postwar, and the continued dominance of long-surviving firms such as Asahi, Kirin, and Sapporo. Featuring an array of Japanese sources, this book further illustrates how post-war marketing campaigns and shifting consumer preferences made beer Japan’s leading alcoholic beverage by the 1960s.




Cartographic Japan


Book Description

Introduction to Part II - Kären Wigen -- Mapping the City -- 13. Characteristics of Premodern Urban Space - Tamai Tetsuo -- 14. Evolving Cartography of an Ancient Capital - Uesugi Kazuhiro -- 15. Historical Landscapes of Osaka - Uesugi Kazuhiro -- 16. The Urban Landscape of Early Edo in an East Asian Context - Tamai Tetsuo -- 17. Spatial Visions of Status - Ronald P. Toby -- 18. The Social Landscape of Edo - Paul Waley -- 19. What Is a Street? - Mary Elizabeth Berry -- Sacred Sites and Cosmic Visions -- 20. Locating Japan in a Buddhist World - D. Max Moerman




The Blitz and its Legacy


Book Description

Triggered in part by contemporary experiences in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere, there has been a rise in interest in the blitz and the subsequent reconstruction of cities, especially as many of the buildings and areas rebuilt after the Second World War are now facing demolition and reconstruction in their turn. Drawing together leading scholars and new researchers from across the fields of planning, history, architecture and geography, this volume presents an historical and cultural commentary on the immediate and longer-term impacts of wartime destruction. The book's contents in 14 chapters cover the spread of themes from experiencing the war to reconstruction and its experiences; and although many chapters draw upon the UK experience, there is deliberate inclusion of some material from mainland Europe and Japan to emphasise that the experiences, processes and products are not London-specific. A comparative book tracing destruction to reconstruction is a relative rarity, and yet of the utmost importance in possessing wider relevance to post-disaster reconstructions. The Blitz and Its Legacy is a fascinating volume which includes war experiences of destruction, architecture, urban design, the political process of planning and reconstruction, and also popular perceptions of rebuilding. Its findings provide very timely lessons which highlight the value of learning from historical precedent.




Beyond the Metropolis


Book Description

In Beyond the Metropolis, Louise Young looks at the emergence of urbanism in the interwar period, a global moment when the material and ideological structures that constitute "the city" took their characteristic modern shape. In Japan, as elsewhere, cities became the staging ground for wide ranging social, cultural, economic, and political transformations. The rise of social problems, the formation of a consumer marketplace, the proliferation of streetcars and streetcar suburbs, and the cascade of investments in urban development reinvented the city as both socio-spatial form and set of ideas. Young tells this story through the optic of the provincial city, examining four second-tier cities: Sapporo, Kanazawa, Niigata, and Okayama. As prefectural capitals, these cities constituted centers of their respective regions. All four grew at an enormous rate in the interwar decades, much as the metropolitan giants did. In spite of their commonalities, local conditions meant that policies of national development and the vagaries of the business cycle affected individual cities in diverse ways. As their differences reveal, there is no single master narrative of twentieth century modernization. By engaging urban culture beyond the metropolis, this study shows that Japanese modernity was not made in Tokyo and exported to the provinces, but rather co-constituted through the circulation and exchange of people and ideas throughout the country and beyond.




Cities, Autonomy, and Decentralization in Japan


Book Description

Adding a new perspective to the current literature on decentralization in Japan, Cities, Autonomy and Decentralization in Japan, approaches the subject from an urban studies and planning approach. The essays in the collection present a cogent compilation of case studies focusing on the past, present and future of decentralization in Japan. These include small scale development in the fields such as citizen participation (machizukuri), urban form and architecture, disaster prevention and conservation of monuments. The contributors suggest that new trends are emerging after the bursting of Japan's economic bubble and assess them in the context of the country's larger socio-political system. This in-depth analysis of the development outside of Japan provides a valuable addition to students of Urban, Asian and Japanese Studies.




Embracing Defeat


Book Description

This study of modern Japan traces the impact of defeat and reconstruction on every aspect of Japan's national life. It examines the economic resurgence as well as how the nation as a whole reacted to defeat and the end of a suicidal nationalism.




Dream Super-Express


Book Description

A symbol of the "new Japan" displayed at World's Fairs, depicted in travel posters, and celebrated as the product of a national spirit of innovation, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen—the first bullet train, dubbed the "dream super-express"—represents the bold aspirations of a nation rebranding itself after military defeat, but also the deep problems caused by the unbridled postwar drive for economic growth. At the dawn of the space age, how could a train become such an important symbol? In Dream Super-Express, Jessamyn Abel contends that understanding the various, often contradictory, images of the bullet train reveals how infrastructure operates beyond its intended use as a means of transportation to perform cultural and sociological functions. The multi-layered dreams surrounding this high-speed railway tell a history not only of nation-building but of resistance and disruption. Though it constituted neither a major technological leap nor a new infrastructural connection, the train enchanted, enthralled, and enraged government officials, media pundits, community activists, novelists, and filmmakers. This history of imaginations around the monumental rail system resists the commonplace story of progress to consider the tug-of-war over the significance of the new line. Is it a vision of the future or a reminder of the past, an object of international admiration or a formidable threat? Does it enable new relationships and identities or reify existing social hierarchies? Tracing the meanings assigned to high-speed rail shows how it prompted a reimagination of identity on the levels of individual, metropolis, and nation in a changing Japan.