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Beyond the Metropolis
Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan
By Louise Young UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95538-7
CHAPTER 1
World War One and the City Idea
In the new wave of investments triggered by World War One, the focus of Japan's economic expectations shifted from the nation to the city, where the capitalist revolution's deepening impact was most dramatically felt. Sudden and rapid urban growth stretched the capabilities of city services and strained the seams of the built environment. The war boom propelled new groups to positions of social prominence, swelling the ranks of the new middle and working classes. Though prosperity proved evanescent, the possibility of gaining fabulous wealth in a short period of time was etched in popular memory as a feature of the urban economy, one dimension of the economic and social volatility of modern economic growth. The war years marked the eruption of a new level of crowd violence, on the factory floor and especially in the street, as rice riots broke out in cities throughout the country. Thus, World War One inscribed the image of the city with a new economic and social identity: one associated with an explosive pace of change, with instability, and with the specter of intensified social violence.
Such visions of the city stood in contrast to older urban imaginaries. The feudal concept of the castle town, burnished over three centuries of political stability under Tokugawa rule, envisioned the city as a monument to the enduring power of the military elite. Tokugawa policies concentrated the ruling caste of samurai in the cities, where they constituted as much as 40 percent of the population. The remaining urban population of artisans and merchants supplied the needs and wants of the samurai. Organized as instruments of samurai rule, cities became seats of higher learning and administration, which Tokugawa law defined as the exclusive province of the samurai. With the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime, samurai dominance of the city ended and the myth of samurai permanence was shattered. In the urban reconstructions of the 1870s and 1880s a new vision emerged of the city as instrument of progress and modernity. Exemplified in the remaking of central Tokyo and the famous Ginza brick town, and in the new government buildings that shot up throughout the country, the urban reconstructions of the early Meiji period telegraphed a message to foreigners and Japanese alike about the city as symbol of Japan's capacity for civilization and enlightenment. And though this urban imaginary embraced a sense of managed progress and controlled change, it little prepared people for the tumultuous transformations of the First World War.
Examining the different ways in which World War One catalyzed urban change, this chapter takes up the following questions: Why did a discourse on the modern emerge with such peculiar force in the wake of World War One? What touched off the extended reflection on the newness of everyday life? To understand the intensity and volume of this intellectual production, the pages that follow canvass the impact of the war years on the urban economy, the built environment of the city, and urban society to show why these issues began to register so dramatically in the consciousness of urban residents.
THE ECONOMIC BOOM
Though of minimal significance for Japan militarily, World War One was the third of a series of wars that stimulated the formation of a modern industrial economy. Beginning with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, and followed by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, war booms shaped the contours of Japanese capitalism. Nascent factory production turned out armaments and ships to meet military demand and textiles bound for the East Asian markets that were captured in Japan's first colonial wars. When war broke out in Europe in 1914 the resulting disruptions in the global economy provided an opening for Japanese trade expansion, ushering in the third war boom in the space of twenty years. Although the initial impact of the war was to depress economic activity because of the rupture to international trade, by 1916 the opportunities opened up by the European war had touched off what amounted to a new phase in Japan's industrial revolution. The withdrawal of European textile and light industrial producers from colonial markets in Asia created a void into which Japanese manufacturers rapidly expanded. War cut them off from European sources of chemicals, machinery, and other heavy industrial products, stimulating the development of domestic production. European demand for armaments and other military goods further encouraged the growth of heavy industry. Japanese shippers were called on to handle this increased trade and Japanese yards to build the ships. All this generated a degree of economic expansion that surpassed the earlier war booms. Moreover, unlike during those earlier wars, military activity was limited to a bloodless occupation of German holdings in China and the Pacific, which meant that World War One was not associated with the deprivation and sacrifice that had attended the earlier periods of rapid growth. Far from it, this war boom brought with it a sense of sudden wealth, widespread prosperity, and conspicuous consumption.
The war boom profoundly affected urban economies. While the late nineteenth-century wave of industrialization occurred mainly in and around the metropolises of Tokyo and Osaka and their affiliated ports of Yokohama and Kobe, the World War One boom left its mark on cities of all sizes. In terms of raw statistics, Tokyo and Osaka may have grown bigger and more quickly than the second-tier cities like the four in this book, but the impact of explosive economic growth on those smaller cites was just as intense. Fifty new companies were established in the city of Okayama between 1916 and 1920, and 99 in Sapporo between 1912 and 1920. Investments in Kanazawa's economy spurred leaps in production, pushing the value of manufacturing from 18 million yen in 1916 up to 50 million yen in 1920. Between 1912 and 1921, the value of heavy industrial production in Niigata rose by a factor of 11, from 2.5 million yen to 27.2 million yen. The speed of this expansion not only anchored the urban economy to manufacturing but also associated the modern city with dynamism and rapid economic growth. The surge in urban investment reflected a new confidence in the future of the city.
Economic growth signaled a rise in the movement of goods in and out of the city. Though it expanded everywhere, trade grew most sharply in a port city like Niigata, where goods handled by the harbor rose from 13 million yen in 1912 to 30 million yen in 1921, more than doubling in ten years. Over the same period freight passing through the city's two principal train stations quadrupled, increasing from 10.5 million yen to 46.2 million yen. The growth in their economies integrated cities such as Niigata more closely into national and international markets and marked urban space more distinctly as a node within the modern trade nexus. That, in turn, implied the new power of urban economies to influence partners in trade and, with it, new vulnerabilities to the vicissitudes of the market. The growth of trade also raised the economic profile of cities, identifying them with their key exports and stamping them with the character of their productive base. Kanazawa thus became known as a city of crafts, producing hanabusae silk cloth, gold leaf, and lacquerware. With its oil refineries, Niigata was seen as a center for heavy industry. Okayama was a textile producer, and the beer that took the Sapporo trademark became the symbol of the city's ties to agriculture and the importance of its food processing industries.
The nature of economic activity changed as well during the teens, stamping the urban economy with the imprimatur of modern factory production. One measure of this was the sharp growth in numbers of urban factories. In Okayama 11 new factories employing more than ten workers were established between 1912 and 1920; Sapporo had 52 factories in 1912 and 121 in 1920. Kanazawa's statistical yearbook recorded 190 factories with 6,141 employees in 1916 and 287 factories in 1919 with 8,556 employees. As an Okayama factory survey of 1921 showed, not only did World War One trigger a numerical rise in factories, it also impelled transformation of existing factory production, both in terms of scale (number of workers) and the shift to steam- and gas-powered mechanization. Even the growth of small factories (employing fewer than ten laborers) signaled a shift in the meaning of production, for the war boom generated a movement from household manufacture and the putting-out system to factory-based manufacture of goods such as furniture, lacquerware, tatami mats, umbrellas, and geta (traditional Japanese wooden clogs). For example, the number of factory workers producing lacquerware in Niigata rose from 129 in 1916 to 402 in 1918, a threefold increase. Within the space of a few years production of geta shifted from households concentrated in the neighborhood of Getamachi to factories. Such moves to the factory both altered the relationship of workers to production and changed the socioeconomic character of neighborhoods like Getamachi.
To the political and economic elites who were privy to this knowledge, such statistics demonstrated the capacity of the urban economy to generate ever greater wealth, one more measure of the potential benefits of modern industry. The broader urban citizenry took much the same message from the evidence all around them of new ways to make and spend money. The transformations taking place before their eyes demonstrated to urban residents that cities were now characterized by rapid, even explosive, growth. Cities had become sites of industrial modernity, symbolized by the conversion to factory production and by factory mechanization. As a tendency to identify cities with their principal products revealed, this new urban imaginary fore-grounded economic function: Japanese began to equate cities with their economic base. Wartime developments harnessed Japanese cities ever tighter to the engine of industrial expansion; their fate now hung on the future of the Japanese economy. In all these respects, the latest war boom altered the meaning of the city as an economic entity, and the possibilities for urban growth seemed boundless.
Yet there was a dark side to the new urban dynamics. Even as statistics captured for the record unprecedented economic growth, these numbers did not always translate into improved livelihood for city residents. Perhaps even more than the expansion of urban economic activity, the movements in prices and wages during World War One demonstrated the new volatility of the urban economy, for it could both raise and lower urban living standards. While wage increases were widely welcomed by working-class urbanites, the price increases that soon followed were not. And though price increases improved profit margins of industrialists and merchants, they regarded wage hikes with alarm. Thus while inflation translated into a generalized sense of economic anxiety, the specific impact on prices and wages split workers and capitalists and served as one factor in the mounting tensions between new social groups.
Although wage and price inflation had been a conspicuous feature of the earlier war booms, nothing prepared Japanese people for the increases of the late teens. Wages began to rise in 1915 and 1916 and then suddenly accelerated their upward trajectory until they peaked in 1920. The movement of commodity prices told a similar story. In 1918 newspapers everywhere reported the "violent rise" (boto) in prices, and they were filled with articles documenting the alarming increase in the cost of living. Okayama's San'yo shinpo reported a chamber of commerce survey of various shops in the city that compared basic food prices between 1914 and 1919; in an easy-to-read chart, the paper gave readers concrete numerical evidence on which to hang their feelings of alarm and outrage. Special-grade rice had more than doubled in price, table salt and cooking oil had tripled, and the fourteen other consumer staples included in the chart registered equivalent leaps in price. As boto became a catchphrase of the late teens, it underscored the dangers of rapid growth and the volatility inherent in the modern economy. Like prices of the late teens, the expanding urban economy could quickly spin out of control.
THE CONSTRUCTION BOOM
While the explosive growth of World War One altered the economic meaning of the city, the physical transformation of urban sites over this same period changed the significance of the city in other ways. The rapid expansion of production, the rapid influx of population, and the rapid increase in the circulation of goods and people all placed pressing new demands on urban infrastructure, setting off a frenzy of construction that identified the city as a site of speed and ephemerality.
Electric power, introduced in the late 1880s, became exponentially more widespread in the teens, illuminating the streets, electrifying middle- and upper-class households, and transforming factory production. In Sapporo, for example, there were 255 streetlights in 1911; by 1920 the number had risen to 7,835. Over the same period households that were supplied with electricity increased from 2,695 to 21,075, and factory consumption leapt from four thousand to over 4 million kilowatt hours. While in previous decades, the gaslight and the spindle served as symbols of civilization and enlightenment, they were being replaced by a modernity of the neon sign and electrical appliance.
Like many cities, Kanazawa laid a streetcar line in the teens. Before it opened to great fanfare in early 1919, the streetcar necessitated an extensive reshaping of the city along the path of the rail line, the razing of scores of stores and residences, and the destruction of neighborhoods in order to widen the road to accommodate the streetcars. A vibrant new commercial and entertainment strip sprang up on the foundation of old neighborhoods along the tracks, creating what would become the heart of "modern Kanazawa."
In Niigata, the municipal government had carried out wharf construction and port improvements continuously since 1907, dredging the Shinano River, improving the banks, building a breakwater, and erecting a lighthouse. When Niigata annexed Nuttari, its sister city on the opposite bank of the Shinano River, the two communities commenced construction on an elaborate new wharf to expand Niigata's port facilities. At the same time, the city began an ambitious landfill project on the east side of the river, creating tracts of worker housing next to the industrial zone that was taking shape along the riverbank. The dredging, the riparian works, and the landfill dramatically reshaped the river and altered its course. In the space of a few years the river—which had been the economic and social center of these two port cities for generations—was utterly transformed.
In Okayama, where a river also ran through the heart of the city, municipal government began to reconstruct the main Kyobashi Bridge in 1915. After two years of work the old wooden structure was replaced with a reinforced concrete construction. Like the lighting of Sapporo's streetlamps, the inaugural run of Kanazawa's streetcar, or the ceremony marking the completion of Niigata's wharf, the opening of Okayama's new bridge was a moment of great civic pride. A photograph of the ceremony published March 25, 1917, shows the bridge thronged with people as they surged up from the embankments to step onto the bridge the San'yo shinpo proudly hailed as the "first reinforced concrete bridge in the prefecture."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beyond the Metropolis by Louise Young. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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