Beyond the Metropolis is an enormously wide-ranging book that seeks to treat the interrelations of all the elements—material, psychological, intellectual, political, cultural, demographic—that constituted and propelled Japan's rapid urbanization in the wake of World War I. Focusing on Niigata, Okayama, Kanazawa, and Sapporo, Louise Young makes a compelling case that urbanized modernity in Japan did not converge into homogenized lesser imitations of the Tokyo metropolis, but was driven in large part by local inflections. Her thesis goes one step further: the cities, including “second cities” and their regional hinterlands, actually took over from the nation as a whole the role of primary driver of the course of modernization in Japan between 1918 and 1937.
The material side of the urbanization phenomenon is the most straightforward. Railroads changed everything. In the Meiji period, the national government sponsored the initial expansion of the railroad system, picking routes concentrated on the Pacific side of the Japan Alps that would benefit the new nation strategically and economically by facilitating trade with Western nations. Two of Young's examples got railroad stations relatively early considering their distance from Tokyo: Sapporo in 1880, and the castle town of Okayama in 1891. Niigata and Kanazawa, facing the Japan Sea, had to wait a few more years until 1897. All four were thus connected to Tokyo, and to Tokyo priorities.
But World War I brought a second stage in the railroad system, and in every locale associated with it. Orders poured in from Japan's wartime allies, leading to a construction boom, jumps in wages and prices, and shipping expansion. It also brought massive migration from villages to nearby cities, urban squalor, and a sharply uneven distribution of wealth. Fortunately for Niigata, located in ura-Nihon, facing the Sea of Japan rather than the more developed Pacific side of the Japan Alps, trade with China in the temporary absence of Western competitors expanded enormously. Both stimulating and responding to these developments, railroads in all four of Young's regions rapidly branched out from the trunk lines into the surrounding countryside. Electrified light rail, augmented by bicycles and automobiles, forever linked regional villages to their expanding urban centers.
In some ways the rapidly growing provincial cities were more closely connected to the Tokyo metropole than in the Meiji era. But what they needed was new identities of their own. All four cities in Young's study, and presumably many more, were suddenly swamped with thousands of immigrants from the countryside, and suffered the loss of what Young terms “the social memory of the community that rested on the geographic stability of successive generations of residents” (p. 141). That left a vacuum filled by everything that local leaders, intellectuals, artists, and opinion-makers could toss into it. These efforts incorporated a sense of urgency for two reasons: the fear that the past would simply be lost, and the fear, intensified after the rice riots of 1918, that social stability was falling apart. The bulk of the book is concerned with these mainly nonmaterial vacuum fillers, how they differed from one location to another, and how they interacted in complex and sometimes unintended ways to reimagine and reconstitute the cities as centers of culture, learning, trade, and commerce, and as loci of progress.
One example is the wave of local history writing that peaked throughout Japan in the 1920s. Niigata writers focused on the history of the port. Kanazawa and Okayama historians exalted their cities' roles as castle towns. Kanazawa scholars put special emphasis on the city's continuing functions as a cultural center, while in Sapporo the emphasis was on the relatively short history of Japanese immigration and development in Hokkaido. All included studies of local folklore customs deemed to be in danger of extinction, and all sought to construct a regional cultural identity, emphasizing “famous places” (meisho) and other elements that provided some continuity with the past, and the sense that the present was its natural outgrowth. They deliberately fostered local pride, and were joined in that effort by new urban newspapers with a regional circulation.
There was no shortage of local boosters and intellectuals to do the writing. In all four cities, the very top literary and artistic figures tended to move to Tokyo and seldom returned, but the next tier remained, and their numbers were augmented by young graduates of Tokyo universities drawn to provincial cities to teach in middle schools and higher schools. They not only imparted an intellectual luster to their adoptive cities, but became urban boosters as well, and their pupils were largely the sons of elites from each city's village hinterlands who came to see their own futures as linked to the city, and in large numbers were transformed into members of the urban middle class. Still more university graduates from Tokyo sought employment in city governments, where urban planning had become a major source of jobs. While they spread Tokyo culture outward, they also became involved in actively defining and shaping local identity, and in reorienting it toward the future.
If local histories portrayed the urban present as the teleological culmination of the past, local exhibitions and “new famous places” (shin meisho) pointed residents and tourists toward the future. The former included industrial fairs and local museums. The latter designated local icons of modernity—department stores, radio towers, a road in Okayama carrying traffic under rather than across a railroad, elevators. Visitors were escorted along a local time line that emphasized each city's unique characteristics and potentials, while pointing to visions of the future that in some aspects tended to converge.
Young convincingly argues that World War I exerted a transformative effect on Japan's cities and citizens that far exceeded its military or diplomatic importance for Japan. That domestic effect was forcibly restrained once the next war began. From 1937 to 1945, national ideology targeted the consumerism of urban culture, epitomized in the image of the “modern girl” (moga), and rigorously subordinated the plans of Japan's cities to the priorities of national mobilization. Further, in 1945, most of Japan's major cities were bombed to rubble, although for a variety of reasons only one of Young's urban examples—Okayama—suffered that fate. But the urbanization genie did not stay in the bottle. With the Pacific War over, the constellation of local agency and global forces gradually reasserted itself in the cities. In Young's words, “Placed within the longer sight lines of the twentieth century, the wartime assault on the city registered as a tiny blip, quickly submerged within the larger forces of urban-centrism” (p. 246). No one has elucidated those forces in all their interconnected complexity as well as Young.
