1978 Articles
Tokyo as an Idea: An Exploration of Japanese Urban Thought Until 1945 [1978]
This paper provides a broad overview of various conceptions and approaches to thinking about the essential nature of the city of Tokyo from the shogunal capital of Edo to the capital of the new Meiji state in 1868 on until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. It introduces fully eighty published texts, cited in the Bibliography as “Selected Sources on Japanese Urban Thought,” which included works that included the many recent studies relevant to of the history of Tokyo. The first section deals with tradtional urban thought, with elements of city as place of mediation, a center of power, and as an art. The second section focused in more detail on the Tokugawa city of Edo, separating the viewpoints of samurai and chōnin, reflected in their respectives areas of residence, and the sepate city of the ukiyo floating world created on the kabuki stage and in the Yoshiwara brothel, versus the notion of the proud “Edokko.”
The third section turned to the city of Meiji Tokyo, first as a “showcase” as seen in the Ginza Brick Distrrict, in the formal (and ultimately limited) planning efforts of the Municipal Improvement act of 1886, and in Kōda Rohan’s distinctive analysis of the city in 1898.
The theme then shifts to “Streetcar Tokyo” of 1895-1923 in which the transport network grew quickly, but also an era for new urban problems of a wide variety, and provoking a reaction among those urging a return to the countryside, seen the the writings of the Naturalists. Also considered are the “Municipal Socialists” led by Ibe Isoo, and a long section on official reform of the city governance, led by the American scholar Charles Beard with the support of the mayor Gotō Shinpei. A final sub-section deals with “Urban Moralists” and “Medievalist” antiquarians.
A concluding section on Post-Earthquake Tokyo (1923-27) considers the diverse writing of a variety of novelists and journalists such as Kawabata Yasunari, Ryōtanjo Yū, and Yanagita Kunio, and the work of Kon Wajirō, a professor at Waseda who closely documented the changing patterns of consumption and behavior in Tokyo from Taisho into Shōwa.
Citation: “"Tokyo as an Idea: An Exploration of Japanese Urban Thought Until 1945." Journal of Japanese Studies, 4:1 (Winter 1978). pp. 45-80.
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- The Journal of Japanese Studies
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.2307/132072
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- East Asian Languages and Cultures
- Published Here
- May 28, 2026
Notes
This long and detailed paper evolved from a preliminary report at the “Workshop on the Japanese City” Mt. Kisco, New York, April 23-26, 1976, organized by Professor Robert Smith, a leading anthropologist of Japanese urbanism, and sponsored by the Joint Committee on Japanese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.
After presenting the paper in spring 1976, and my marriage to Kimie Kondo in July, I took up a new position as Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Santa Barbara (UCSB), as the sole specialist in Japanese history; I would hold this position for twelve years, until my move to the Department of East Asian Studies at Columbia University in 1988.
I took my first year at UCSB on leave of absence to accept a Fulbright research fellowship to study the history of Tokyo, with an affiliation with Tokyo Metropolitan University, and living in an old section of the Yamanote area near Shinanomachi station. Many of the fruits of my research that year are reflected in “Tokyo as an Idea,” which was submitted after returning to UCSB in fall 1977 and submitted to the Journal of Japanese Studies. I was able to take good advantage both of crucial collections in Tokyo (notably that of the library at the Center for Municipal Research in Hibiya, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Library. In California, I was fortunate to have access to the interlibrary loan system of the University of California.
Re-reading “Tokyo as an Idea” now, I realize that it is rather over-organized thematically, and does not have a single argument. At the same time, I feel that it really does cover the wide variety of thinking about Tokyo as it was constantly transformed throughout the Meiji period and on into the interwar years that were the setting for Japan’s First Student Radicals, based on my Harvard dissertation. Scattered as it may seem, I feel that it still offers guidance for new students of the history of Tokyo.
