Abstract
Tokyo’s dizzyingly disarrayed built environment almost defies rendering an interpretation of the city’s symbolism. To do so, this article puts forth a geography of power approach that imposes order on the urban grid for analyzing Tokyo, both as a symbolic space and as a terrain of struggle. The global ascendance of Tokyo was made possible by the state’s developmental economic projects materialized in massive infrastructure and architecture built during two critical conjunctures, when the fate of the city could have turned out differently. Pinpointing critical conjunctures takes seriously historical contingency in writing the histories of particular urban spaces. The article documents inter-scalar political forces fostering developmental urbanization in Japan. Developmental urbanization grew out of geo-politics and the quelling of social turmoil in the aftermath of the Second World War and in the context of increasing globalization during the 1970s–80s. The post-imperial reclamation of Japan’s place in the region considers the articulation of Japanese capitalist development in American geo-political networks; the subordination of Japanese social movements and labor; and the tensions inherent in an infrastructural fix to the problem of social conflict.
Introduction
Tokyo’s once gleaming office towers announced its ascendance as a global city, rising like a phoenix out of postwar ruins. 1 From an historical and inter-scalar view, the ascendance of Tokyo was neither obvious nor assured. Tokyo seemed to be an unlikely contender for the status of a global city in the aftermath of carpet-bombing of whole swaths of the city and the decimation of productive capacities. By sifting through the rubble, this article seeks to unearth politics laying the groundwork for the rise and subsequent decline of Tokyo in the world economy.
A closer examination of Sassen’s classic conception of generic global cities, in the first section, will reveal that Tokyo is a global city both similar to and different than global cities in the West and emergent global cities in East Asia. By definition and function, Tokyo fits the statistical portrait of what makes a global city. Tokyo, like New York City and London, operates as a nodal command position in the circuits of capital in the world economy. Yet Tokyo’s origins as a global city remain obscure – born fully formed, as if by Immaculate Conception. A more dynamic picture can crystalize by specifying the connected histories and geographies of Tokyo and cities in the region (Saito, 2003; Saito and Thornley, 2003; Hill and Kim, 2000; Wang, 2003; Hill et al., 2011; Fujita, 2003; Park et al., 2011). Using inter-Asian and trans-Pacific lenses, also deployed by other contributors in this issue, one can highlight the logics of urban developmentalism shaping distinctive political-economies that condition urban forms among these ‘Tiger’ economies.
Tokyo’s dizzyingly disarrayed built environment, however, almost defies rendering an interpretation of the city’s symbolism. To do so, in the next section, the article puts forth a geography of power approach that imposes order on the urban grid for analyzing Tokyo, both as a symbolic space and as a terrain of struggle. Introducing a geography of power perspective excavates local geographies and buried histories informing inter-scalar processes and politics of urbanization. The next section establishes the historical setting, suggesting that residues of empire shaped the geo-political and infrastructural connections in the region.
The global ascendance of Tokyo was made possible by the state’s developmental economic projects materialized in massive infrastructure and architecture built during two critical conjunctures. The first period brackets the end of the Second World War to the beginning of the 1960s that put Japan on its economic path. In the early post-war period, contentious labor and geo-politics influenced the compressed pace of urbanization. In the second period between the 1970s and1980s, the state purposely intervened in a political-bureaucratic project positioning Tokyo at the strategic center of its capitalist growth regime. Distinct urban forms defined each era: modernization of the Imperial railway system and an extensive subway network, symbolized by the Shinkansen bullet train, anticipated the 1964 Olympics that thrust Tokyo back on the world stage; and public works patronage, high rise development, and an international airport at Narita elevated commercial sites in and around Tokyo. At these critical conjunctures, the fate of the city could have turned out differently.
In summary, the production of urban form associated with Tokyo as a global city – its airport, its public spaces, the type of export-oriented financial activities that go on there, and the domestic bubble – need to be situated within the geo-politics of the era and the social struggles that animated it. Rather than positing one generic global city, the narrative of Tokyo’s origin story in this article pays greater attention to the trans-Pacific and East Asian regional political economy that was being constructed at the time, as well as domestic struggles over urban space. 2 A geo-political analysis of Tokyo’s origins as a global city can offer insights into the dynamics of East Asian capitalism and its urban landscapes.
The Origins and Characteristics of Global Cities
With the shift to ‘postindustrial’ production, a select number of city centers in New York, London and Tokyo were positioned as administrative hubs of regional and the global economy. The attempt to define shared characteristics of global cities, however, has masked the historical origins and regional distinctive political-economic governance that differentiate Tokyo, and other East Asian cities from the Anglo-American prototypes. The concept of urban developmentalism unpacks the politics of economic planning that repurposes the built environment for capital accumulation in East Asian cities (see Doucette and Park in this issue). Juxtaposing Tokyo and New York can distinguish the specificities of comparative cases, and thereby rethink the relationship between the logic of capital in general and the logics of ‘the concrete situation’ (Walker, 2016: 70).
What Makes a Global City?
Global cities concentrate finance and producer services and multinational corporate headquarters. An economy-wide diagnostic uncovers the heavy presence of manufacturing employment and R&D functions servicing large manufacturing companies in Tokyo in contrast to NYC (Fujita, 2003: 258). In this sense, Tokyo is not fully post-industrial, but rather reflects ‘neo-industrial’ urban development (2003: 258). Whereas industrial production has almost disappeared in NYC, plummeting to only 6 percent of employment in 2000, manufacturing remains a core economic activity in Tokyo, making up 15.2 percent of employment (Fujita, 2003: 257). Statistically, Tokyo’s service employment jumped from 17.9 percent in 1970 to 31.9 percent by 2000, while functionally finance and service industries are subordinated to manufacturing technology innovation. Japanese companies locate their R&D and development of alternative product lines in Tokyo, and increasingly outsourcing material production to lower-wage sites in neighboring countries (Fujita, 2003: 254–5), initially in Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, then relocating the lion’s share in China (Harvey, 2005: 139). Districts around Tokyo retain a significant concentration of manufacturing produced by a large number of medium and small-sized firms (Fujita, 2003: 270).
The financial industry is embedded in distinct symbolic economies. NYC’s Wall Street and London’s eponymous ‘City of London’ are synonymous with global finance. Japan’s main financial institutions (the Stock Exchange, the Bank of Japan, headquarters of major banks, such as the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and Nomura Securities) reside tucked away in the less conspicuous southeastern part of Tokyo near the main Tokyo Station, whereas foreign banks rent office space in high rises clustered around the regional Asakasa Station. This geographic dispersion of ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ financial institutions in Tokyo spatially mirrors the specific relationship between Japanese capital and the developmental state.
Capital and labor flows also distinguish Tokyo from NYC. Japan imposed high tariffs until the 1980s, limiting foreign direct investment (FDI) in the country. As a result, Japanese-owned and operated firms make up the majority of the world’s largest firms based in Tokyo (Saito and Thornley, 2003: 668). This national character of and the intimate liaison between finance and industrial capital, undergirded by the economic policy architecture linking business and bureaucratic elites in the Ministries of Finance and Economy, Trade and Industry – a holdover from the early post-war restructuring of inter-corporate networks – sets Tokyo apart from NYC. In Tokyo, Japanese firms serviced by Japanese banks form a felicitous relationship that generated astonishing export-led expansion throughout the postwar period until the late 1980s, and then fell victim to its own success when financialization became the engine of growth of the world economy in the 1990s (Harvey, 2005: 89–90). A combination of the transnationalization of Japanese corporations, spiking land prices and the booming stock market, boosting the accumulation of capital, catapulted Tokyo into a financial center for international capital transactions (Machimura, 1998: 186). Trade protectionism in turn was the unwitting handmaiden of immigration controls, staunching the flow of migrants whose cheap reproductive labor provide local amenities to elites in other global cities. The low-levels of inward flows of both capital and labor led some to characterize Tokyo as an ‘immature … world city’ (Kamo, 1992: 10, cited in Saito and Thornley, 2003). Important is the role of state bureaucrats and technocratic policy in tightly coupled economic governance – an institutionalized public/private partnership informing developmental urbanism.
A Global City with a Difference: Tokyo, the West and the Rest Debate
Definitions of what makes a global city, as Saito suggests, ‘run into problems when it moves beyond describing the characteristics of global cities and tries to explain the processes and governance that created and sustained them’ (2003: 285). East Asian scholars correctly, and unavoidably, bring the state back into the analysis of developmental capitalism in this region (Wang, 2003: 311–12; Saito, 2003; Park et al., 2011; Fujita, 2003). Wang’s (2003: 311–12) assessment rebalances the perspective when he notes that global cities are always already embedded in national contexts, which have consequences for the specific features of each global city. Even in market-centered cities, despite more porous borders due to less regulation over capital flows and more labor mobility, the state, both local and national, conditions the structures and processes of accumulation. Further, the developmental state and global cities constantly interact with each other rather than being in opposition to each other (2003: 311–12).
At the same time, a hierarchy places Tokyo in a command and control position relative to other cities in the region, and relative to New York and London at a global scale. The brief for an East Asian perspective on urban developmentalism informs the materialization of global processes in the production of urban forms. Differences between Tokyo and New York and London are consequential in determining trajectories of change and points of friction. It is important to ground analysis of the politics of scale in the histories of specific cases and the particular colonial and post-colonial histories in East Asia. The literature on global cities is insufficiently inter-scalar, largely ignoring contentious politics, underestimating the role of geopolitics, and underexploring the logic of specific places. Adopting a geography of power perspective, the next section seeks to make visible these inter-scalar interactions.
Geographies of Power: An Inter-Scalar Approach
A geographies of power perspective entails inter-scalar processes that are interdependent, linked, contradictory, complex, multifaceted, and uneven in effects across time and space. It considers how, and through what political practices, actors and institutions produce scale (Herod and Wright, 2002: 11) and define space. This geographies of power perspective highlights the political and ideological borderlines racializing national groupings and calls attention to the shifting hegemonies that shape urban space. For instance, to analyze Tokyo, area specialists have brought a regional sensitivity to understanding what makes East Asian global cities distinctive. Too often, however, their construct of region is taken-for-granted. Contiguous nations bound together in Asia share more than a common physical geography; they occupy different positions of power relative to each other and against other world regions. In the early modern period, Asia signified the naming practice given to racially differentiate the East from the West. Japan’s dominance of its neighboring countries through occupation and military force also instantiated geographies of power at a regional scale. The postwar period saw a different regional mapping of East Asia carved out of the new geo-political world order; in particular, the US security apparatus policed borders and boundaries of East Asia (see Choi and Glassman in this issue). Its Janus-face of isolationism and internationalism, directed inward and outward, defined Japan’s singularity.
An analysis of geographies of power renders more visible the historical construction of this imaginary East Asia. To use the term ‘imaginary’ does not mean that Asia did not or does not exist. Rather, it destabilizes the taken-for-granted geographies of economies by unpacking power relations between ‘colonized’ and ‘colonizers’. Colonial residues and historical memories inform fraught political relationships within the region, echoed in the race among cities to gain a dominant place as the next global technology powerhouse.
Furthermore, a geography of power perspective is well suited to help us understand why inter-Asia and globally, the ‘center of gravity’ pivots from a single polar axis in Tokyo to multiple axes in Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul and Beijing. It shows us how the politics of producing scale-restricting capital and labor mobility was inherently fragile, pushing both Japanese and global capital to move to other globalized outposts in the region, while limiting in-migration and restricting pathways to citizenship within a Japan deprived of the capital of a pool of low wage labor that could be exploited. Tokyo as a global city has suffered from a familialistic reproductive bargain that stifled the development of an infrastructure in support of social reproduction and the restriction on migrant care workers who cater to amenities expected and enjoyed by the global elite in other global cities.
Finally, historicizing the origin of Tokyo requires a longer view than the aftermath of the Second World War. The historical antecedents show how Tokyo already achieved its stature with the establishment of empire. The role of empire is more than historical background for contextualizing colonialism and post-colonialism. Empire was the means by which the Japanese state created an infrastructure for economic and military expansion. Residues of empire inform the current constellation of forces in the region.
Historical Setting: From Empire to Developmental Capitalism
In the Shadows of Empire
The railroad and the airport are symbolic and functional hubs emblematic of Japan’s modernity; both represent sites of private and state interventions projecting empire, building the modern nation-state, and sites of post-war contentious politics over the economic fate of the nation. At the turn of the 20th century, Japan built an extensive railway system throughout the colonies, consolidating the physical empire and supporting the circulation and transmission of art, material culture, and cross-border exchanges in spaces around Tokyo already prefigured in ‘the floating world’ (Kleeman, 2014: 7, 18). Railroads are legacies of the prewar military complex and the dismantling of the postwar military machine: the infrastructure for industrial modernization, thrusting empire into their territories and epitomizing the iconic Japanese corporate networks (keiretsu) that own rail-lines to combine transportation with urban commerce in department stores at the terminus (Gottfried, 2015).
Japan’s postwar model crystallizes in the twin development of rail and air transport. To ensure reliable transportation in their effort to rebuild capitalist productive capacity in 1949, the US General Headquarters (GHQ) issued a directive to reorganize much of the rail system by forming the Japanese National Railways (JNR), a state-owned public corporation. The Liberal Democratic Party realized its postwar economic agenda, introducing and expanding high-speed rail including the line from Tokyo’s main stations to Narita Airport, with little input from unions and despite strikes and protests throughout the 1960s. The airport, upon closer inspection, reveals a turbulent history of the post-war settlement in the shadows of its imperial entanglements. In the expanse between the airport and Tokyo lies a forgotten history, also a part of the revved up engine that propelled Japan’s muscular economy to its global zenith. Using the powers of eminent domain, the state expropriated farmers’ land in the mid-1960s, and then privatized the airport authority in the early years of the new millennium. Following a neoliberal playbook, JNR was dismantled and privatized in 1987.
Current literature on imperial formations has tracked the genealogies of empire, both its historical antecedents and its contemporary ‘imperial formations’ (Stoler, 2013: 3; Steinmetz, 2013; Hardt and Negri, 2001). Empire marks both the symbolic and material role of Japan’s military and economic domination in the region. What’s left behind has escaped notice in much of the analysis of Japan’s present crisis and the sliding fortunes of Tokyo. Stoler reminds us that imperial power resides in often overlooked and seemingly imperceptible residues. Japan’s vestiges of colonialism cast a long shadow on the scarred lives and landscapes within and across countries in East Asia. Through the lens of imperial formations, it becomes possible to see how the Japanese state established its economic hegemony and then lost its way in the twilight of the 20th century.
Japan’s imperial project both emulated and rejected Western models of empire. On the one hand, Japan’s political elite commandeered the idea of gunboat diplomacy from the West (Chae, 2013: 402) in order to accomplish the annexation of colonies in Asia at the turn of the 20th century (Kleeman, 2014: 1–2). On the other hand, the state articulated both an ethno-historical discourse that emphasized a common Asiatic cultural and racial identity and a colonial narrative in which Japan claimed control over ancient Korea to justify its colonial rule (Chae, 2013: 404–5). Though Japan’s territorial expansion was more limited in scale and in scope than either the British or French empires, the close geographic proximity fostered more frequent flows and exchanges of people, ideas, and material culture within what became defined as the East Asian region (Kleeman, 2014: 2). More specifically, these dual aspects of Japanese expansion entailed what Kleeman (2014: 4) calls ‘colonial disregard’, to describe ‘the process of erasure’ whereby the Meiji administrative powers concealed internal colonization of peoples from Hokkaido to Okinawa; and ‘colonial regard’, to describe the ‘mimicry of Western superpowers’. The legacy of imperialism resonates in contemporary nation-building.
Empire is inscribed in the rise and decline of Tokyo from its heights as a global capital. Japan’s conquest seeded the geopolitical and infrastructural connections that aided and abetted economic (under)development in the region. Tokyo was the symbolic center of and the transportation nexus for the far-flung empire. Regional dynamics further cannot be understood without reference to the postwar settlement forged during the Cold War. From Tokyo the US Occupation forces stabilized the Japanese political-bureaucratic apparatus and quelled political dissent.
Contentious Politics: The Making of Developmental Capitalism in Post-War Japan
At the end of the Second World War, America played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Japanese employment and political systems and in laying the groundwork for Japan’s accelerated economic growth. Tokyo assumed the role of administrative and political capital of the globalizing capitalist network. In this view, Japan’s economic miracle was neither an inevitable outcome of a collectivist ethos derived from Confucianism nor of hierarchical relations inherited from feudalism (West, 2003: 3). Instead, geo-politics paved the way for Japan’s spectacular postwar economic ascent.
Internationally, the Cold War climate fostered US foreign policy goals vis-à-vis Japan: the US saw Japan as a strategic partner in Asia, as a key geo-political location for stationing American troops, and as an ideological bulwark against communism looming in China and the Soviet Union. The outbreak of war in Korea helped to jumpstart Japan’s flailing manufacturing sector, propping up industries from textiles, vehicles, raw materials, and primary metal products to medicines: special procurements injected an estimated $2.3 billion into Japan and the influx of military personnel and their families stimulated further construction and services, especially in Tokyo (Dower, 1999: 541–2; see also Choi and Glassman in this issue). Many Japanese companies invested their windfall profits by upgrading equipment and ‘acquir[ing] of rights to American commercial licenses and patents … that the US government strongly supported as crucial for the economic well-being of its still-fragile cold War associate’ (Dower, 1999: 543). After the war ended, ‘the US allowed Japan to participate in …. the US-directed reconstruction of South Korea’ (1999: 542). Around the same time, a treaty signed in 1951 gave the US the right to establish military bases in Japan and to call on Japan for aid in case war broke out in the region (Global Nonviolent Action Database) – the renewal of this treaty has sparked mass demonstrations provoking episodic waves of protest in front of the Diet.
America’s role also shaped the institutional architecture and trajectory of Japan’s developmental capitalism, giving prominence to Tokyo. In ‘the fortress-like Dai-ichi Insurance building’ (LSA, 2013: 55), a setting resonant of muscular military strength, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), General Douglas MacArthur, oversaw the writing of a new constitution and labor laws, modeled on the US National Labor Relations Act. Militant class conflict might have changed the course of history if the Occupation forces had not prohibited a general strike in Tokyo, canceled by the organizers on the eve of the mass mobilization in February 1947, and if the US military presence had not posed as a potent deterrent. SCAP’s takeover of the imposing white colonnade facade in sight of the Imperial Palace staked a symbolic position in Chiyoda at the heart of the new and the old seats of governmental power in Tokyo.
In the wake of the Second World War Japan teetered on the brink. Tokyo resembled a war zone. Housing shortages, food scarcity, and rampant exploitation catalyzed radical grassroots movements among students, workers, and housewives (Dower, 1999). Socialist and communist parties were political forces able to channel discontent into dramatic symbolic actions, most prominently in and around Tokyo. In 1946, workers seized control over the means of production in coal mines, newspaper offices, electric railways, and machine shops concentrated in Tokyo. While protests roiled satellite cities, Tokyo was a privileged site for enacting protests because of its public spaces accommodating large crowds, because of easy access as a transportation hub connecting participants from outlying areas, and because of the symbolic importance of the city’s political landmarks. For example, a labor-farm alliance, along with cultural groups, mobilized 70,000 to attend a ‘people’s assembly’ in Hibiya Park in central Tokyo, and May Day rallies in Tokyo marshalled half a million people waving red flags and carrying banners with slogans calling for ‘equal wages for men and women in equal work’ (Dower, 1999: 262). This revolutionary fervor inspired several million workers who pledged to honor the call for a general strike in the early months of the following year. MacArthur could not abide a general strike. A work stoppage of this magnitude could have brought down the fragile government. Acting to preserve the status quo and to keep a lid on worker’s mobilization, General MacArthur banned the strike. Radical labor groups upped the ante in the months that followed. In the midst of the Cold War and in response to the communist/socialist inspired movements, the Occupation forces reversed course, rescinding public employees’ right to strike (Dower, 1999: 271–2). Suppression and repression of domestic communist parties, left-leaning unionists and students was a part of the domestic ‘security’ alliance.
The Cold War exerted a lasting influence over the state bureaucratic apparatus, The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers promoted administrative ‘rationalization’ that concentrated and strengthened an already centralized national state (Dower, 1999: 27). The Japanese bureaucracy came in handy as a means of implementing General MacArthur’s mandates. One of the major governmental reorganizations gave birth to the powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI, later METI) in 1949. Already by 1927, the Ministry of Finance effectively ‘controlled’ the financial system (Taggart, 2008), and Japanese authorities maintained monetary independence even during the Occupation (Metzler, 2013: 72). As a consequence, ‘six such major concentrations of economic power had emerged, all centering on city banks … and all but one represented reclusterings or reconfigurations of the old zaibatsu’ [business conglomerate] by the early 1950s (Dower, 1999: 546). MITI, along with the Ministry of Finance, rendered technical decisions cast in the national interest, but in fact served the dominant alliance between the state and business interests. Unions exerted little leverage at the national level, weakened by the red purges.
Political alliances brought together conservative politicians and business interests expressed in the newly-founded Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) formed by the merger of two competing conservative parties in 1955 (Tsukamoto, 2012: 401). The LDP secured more than 60 percent of the seats in the 1958 election of the Lower House, and dominated electoral politics for the next 50 years (Samuels, 1981). However, Horiuchi (2013) expresses skepticism that the LDP’s victory alone was the decisive factor explaining double-digit growth on the eve of the next decade. In this account Horiuchi persuasively argues that the new security relationship forged with the US fundamentally altered Japan’s economic prospects. An adjunct to the security alliance was an economic pact in which the US absorbed a large share of Japan’s exports, facilitated bank loans, and provided subsidies, relieving the Japanese state of considerable outlays for defense spending. The ruling LDP then directed ‘savings’ toward domestic economic purposes to shore up political patronage, solidifying their hold on government power. Overall, the economic miracle was rooted in ‘good’ institutions and favorable policies, but also enjoyed exceptional international circumstances providing the conditions for sustained growth (Horiuchi, 2013).
By the end of the decade a massive protest against the security treaty threatened the fragile alliance between Japan and the US (Horiuchi, 2013). Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, one of the architects of the LDP’s conservative industrial and foreign policy (Samuels, 1981), had made strengthening and ratifying the security treaty with the US foremost amongst his top priorities. Despite mass mobilizations, the Diet passed the treaty in short order after Kishi authorized the police to extricate Socialist Party MPs from the parliament on 19 May 1960. Protests continued and intensified, sparking strikes and culminating in a rally of more than 120,000 people. Organizers chose the National Diet Building to stage the largest rallies. Smaller skirmishes did occur elsewhere but did not have the dramatic impact of the gathering amassed around the Diet. In the face of mounting pressure Kishi resigned, defusing this politically volatile situation. By 1960 the LDP was ensconced in office, propped up by US economic aid.
To effectively subdue the remnants of social movements, the state had to secure consent for its ruling authority. Once the LDP had solidified power, the state dictated rapid modernization aimed at building physical infrastructure for the reconstruction of the economy. A national(ist) narrative filtered modern subjects through the binary of Japanese/non-Japanese based on the exclusion of (colonial) ‘Others’. To sustain this juxtaposition, the modern state reinvented a tradition of an authentic monolithic culture. In particular, the construction of Japaneseness erased the recognition of other subject positions and fostered a kind of historical amnesia for forgetting Japan’s colonial past. Through the Immigration and Control Law and strict enforcement the state created a border regime, regulating the mode of entry, the movement of bodies within and across nations, and restricting the terms and conditions of living and working in Japan, that undergirded this inward turn. Institutionally embedded in the enterprise, unions stood to benefit short-term from submerging their class solidarity and merging their interests with the firm’s. Consensus bargaining provided male union members with real economic gains, but only as long as the company prospered from the arrangement. Going forward, neutered unions narrowed their claims on realizing company citizenship rights, effectively surrendering their claims on rights to the city. A quelled radical opposition left the developmental coalition to rebuild Tokyo.
This brief political history has highlighted the inter-scalar politics that put Japan on its economic path. The US Occupation forces along with US economic aid and special military procurements fueled the expansion of manufacturing and buttressed the establishment of the LDP’s stronghold on the levers of national government. Furthermore, the relation between Japan and the US has continued to inform Japanese urban development long after the Cold War in the form of providing export markets for goods but also swelling currency reserves. Bubblenomics, a term coined by Taggart Murphy (2009), historicizes how the felicitous networked relationship between banks, the state bureaucracy and the export industry that fueled the economic miracle’s virtuous cycle later fed the vicious downward spiral, due to the sclerotic institutions staying the course despite growing signs of weakness. A policy based on combining systemic suppression of domestic demand with the deliberate channeling of financing into internationally competitive export industries ran up trade surpluses and accumulated US dollars. When US currency reserves reached the point where they began to have serious effects on Japan’s ability to conduct monetary policy, the authorities deliberately cultivated asset bubbles in an attempt to counteract the dollar build-up. Japan’s political economy, closely aligning and entwining the state with financial and industrial capital, provided the institutional backing for the developmental coalition and the unique type of financial arrangements that are reflected in the kind of services located in Tokyo.
Tokyo: Turning East and West
Tokyo experienced major growth spurts later than the more mature economies of New York and London. In the aftermath of the war, the state’s infrastructure projects absorbed surplus capital and labor (Harvey, 2011: 202). Tokyo’s sprawling and dense built environment grew up and out in bits and pieces, fits and starts, from the ashes of war destruction. Allied bombing had eviscerated whole neighborhoods, wiping out nearly 65 percent of all buildings in an uneven grid across the city. Pockmarked land lay waste where poor residences, small machine shops and factories once stood, while the wealthier quarter survived ‘largely undamaged’ and was replaced downward by ‘“little America”, the home to MacArthur’s General Headquarters’ (Dower, 1999: 47). Rebuilding Tokyo accelerated when political actors cleared the path, readying urban space for its developmental agenda. 3
Construction for the Olympics jumpstarted urban renewal on the eve of the 1960s, and enhanced the image of Tokyo and the nation to the world. Before leaving office, Prime Minister Kishi spearheaded the winning bid for the 1964 Olympics and funneled substantial funds to pay for massive infrastructure and ‘public works’ projects. In the lead-up to the opening ceremonies, the state modernized the imperial railway network and subway system, and fashioned bold venues for the sporting competition. The award brought prestige to Japan, as the first Asian nation to host the Olympics, and showcased Tokyo’s modernity and technological progress, most notably symbolized by Japanese-designed architecture (e.g. Kenzo Tange’s elegant Yoyogi National Gymnasium) and by high-speed Shinkansen. The bullet train hurtling across the island nation became an emblem of national pride, and did the work of shedding vestiges of Japan’s aggressive war image. At the time Tokyo’s destiny as a global city was not assured. However, its stature as the symbolic center and as the rail hub made it the likely candidate.
During the 1970s, the state shaped the urban landscape to withstand the economic tsunami rippling globally. Japanese capitalism, based on manufacturing, would remain the focal point of the growth regime. Finance capital continued to support export-led production. Intensified global competition pushed the state toward a technology-centered approach to urban development, a process discussed in more detail by Fujita (2003) and Saito (2003). Their otherwise excellent analysis of urban planning politics does not fully explain the historical and geo-political factors that both propelled and later stalled the economic miracle, that is, the inherent tensions to developmental capitalism.
The second turning point occurred in the midst of contentious politics at the end of the 1960s and 1970s, student protests, including struggles against the expropriation of land to locate Narita Airport, and public sector strikes. Suppression and the enduring class compromise weakened these movements. Photos of the 1960s era capture the roiling struggles between helmeted police and protesters alike. Early years of the 1970s saw an uptick of strikes, involving public sector unions, and hotbeds of former student radicals – echoes of the late 1940s. Unlike the previous period of contentious politics redolent of revolution from below, most unions remained in the embrace of consensus bargaining. Consensus bargaining enabled exported-oriented firms to manufacture consent among its core workforce, which contributed to a relatively quiescent working class. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when oil shocks reverberated in this oil-dependent nation, there was a relative decline of manufacturing, while financial capital consolidated its base in Tokyo. Employment mushroomed an astonishing 28 percent in finance, insurance and real estate; whereas employment in manufacturing declined 15 percent even though a small percentage of new manufacturing jobs became available in other parts of Japan. Nonetheless, Japanese banks financed export-oriented production by Japanese companies.
Although less dramatic than the 1964 Olympics, the 1980s’ commission of a new landmark city government building coincided with the state’s promotion of Tokyo’s global ambition. From the choice of Japanese architect, the location in the vibrant shopping area anchored at Shinjuku Station, to the structure’s Lego-like exterior, the 48-storey building sought to present Tokyo as a world-class city. Tokyo Metropolitan government again turned to renowned Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, whose aesthetic referenced ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, East and West, and integrated digital imagery mimicking the computer chip. The visual elements fittingly concretized technological prowess epitomizing modern Japan. Not coincidently, the choice of a Japanese architect also signaled Japanese know-how. Finished in 1990, this pre-bubble building, the tallest in Tokyo until 2006, rendered the cityscape in the veneer of an ‘invented’ Japanese tradition and a Japanese casting of modernity.
Attesting to the construction industry’s importance as a political boondoggle, the ruling party of the Liberal Democrats subsidized the building explosion even after the country’s economy took a tailspin during the Lost Decade of the 1990s. A construction boom in Tokyo created jobs for working-class men, whose employment rose by 23 percent from 1985 to 1997. Industrial areas were replaced by postmodern office buildings, housing for high-income residents and complexes eliding commercial shopping malls with cultural institutions such as museums and concert halls (Machimura, 1998: 186). Land speculation and the subsequent plunge in land prices was the model’s undoing. As reported in The New York Times, beneath the surface of civil engineering projects is political pork spending that fueled economic growth in the postwar period, sustaining the Liberal Democratic Party in power for most of the past half century (Tabuchi, 2009: 4).
Economic malaise lingered into the 21st century. Urban developmentalism in Japan changed from the public work orientation to increasing neoliberal influence over urbanization processes. Private enterprises, in partnership with local authorities, sought to restructure space surrounding the Tokyo Station in the central business district of Marunouchi. This locale accommodated 230,000 workers toiling away in high-rise office buildings mostly owned by Mitsubishi, one of the biggest corporate conglomerates currently controlling nearly 40 percent of the land (Languillon-Aussel, 2014). After the asset price bubble collapsed, private developers actively looked to redefine public spaces (Languillon-Aussel, 2014). New sub-centers and industrial clusters brand districts around the city. During the past two decades, Japanese capitalism has morphed into a neoliberal dreamscape for private interests.
Tokyo municipal government wielded ‘global city’ as a sign in policy discourses, harkening back to its Japanese uniqueness while projecting an international (Western) future(ist) vision of Tokyo. Their zealous pursuit of changing the built environment was motivated by an ideological and political commitment to the growth machine and the structural necessity for expanded capital accumulation (Machimura, 1998: 188). The very obsession with local uniqueness to attract global investment centered on cooling the overheated economy, but it could not reverse the downturn.
Developmental urbanization could not rescue the economic freefall. In a last-ditch effort after three decades of slow economic growth and to shore up Tokyo’s attractiveness as a place for business, the Diet promulgated the National Strategic Special Zones Act (NSSZA) of 2013/14. This initiative created subnational spaces of exception by reconfiguring the boundaries of the Tokyo zone from Tokyo metropolis, Kanagawa prefecture, Chiba to Narita city. Designating an enclave gave the Tokyo Metropolitan government and Abe’s coalition the rhetorical shield to ‘realize its Tokyo Global Financial Center vision’ by drawing together the clusters of financial entities and institutions along the bounded corridor’ and to provide incentives for business investment by deregulation and by easing entry of skilled ‘guest workers’ and expats applying for temporary residence. Tokyo zone exemplified the neoliberal shift redefining geographies of power, that is, how international business functions in the newly formed urban configurations.
Seemingly distant work conditions and processes ripple from one location to another as a result of increasing global and regional interconnections. Financialization of assets, heretofore in place by the 1970s, generated a crisis of capital accumulation on a global scale. From the 1980s onward, the surplus absorption problem fueled speculation and boosted property prices, inflating an already overextended housing bubble (Harvey, 2008). Meanwhile, the financial elite parked capital in construction sites of earlier global cities, or erected crystalline cityscapes in emergent regional global cities in India and China. The built urban environment, thus, is not merely a façade behind which the real economy must be analyzed. Global urban spaces concretize capital accumulation in both form and function. The Japanese state cannot build itself out of the crisis, and the increasing sourcing of production outside of the country and in the Tokyo zone are the latest spatial fixes attempting to maintain capital accumulation, which undermines the consensus bargain that had anchored the material conditions of the model.
Changing Geographies of Power: Tokyo and Its Discontents
Emergent Global Cities in East Asia
The process of financialization bids up real estate properties, making it expensive to conduct business in New York, London and Tokyo, which in turn undermines the appeal of these leading global cities. As a consequence, certain global functions are transferred from distinctive financial districts in city centers to nearby cities or off-shored to countries with cheaper rents and lower wages. And changes in the labor process enabled by computer technologies extend the global reach of finance and banking. For example, call centers relocate work to lower wage areas and enclaves in globalizing cities and to English-speaking countries in the Caribbean, and to India and the Philippines (see Jana Kliebert in this issue). Transnational corporations faced with high costs of doing business move operations to cities in the cheaper Global South.
Rival cities in the region now compete for prominence in the global economy, threatening Tokyo’s position in the hierarchy of global cities. Tokyo’s vulnerability is rooted in the connected histories of the region. The operation and orientation of finance capital in Tokyo is more closely bound to the nation and to the region than the finance industry in NYC and London. Recently, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Seoul have emerged as regional global cities, or as ‘second tier’ mega-cities (Gugler, 2004: 3). These cities are considered global to the extent that finance and other business services operate on a denationalized but primarily regional scale. However, they are considered second-tier based on the relative density of transnational headquarters, at levels higher than most cities but still lower than in older global cities. The location of these cities in poorer nations, without the social and physical infrastructures to support the large number of people arriving in search of jobs, differentiates these second-tier global cities from the first-tier. Such rapid in-migration produces mega-cities with enormous populations, drawing mostly on migrants from their own domestic hinterlands.
Older global cities repurpose the built environment to accommodate shifting economic functions; up-and-coming global cities in East Asia rely on state-directed development efforts to transform the built environment – quick spatial fixes offer instantaneous cosmopolitanism by hiring ‘starchitects’ whose brand names and styles convey global prestige value and aspirational status in the symbolic economy. Tokyo’s bid in the architectural sweepstakes worked in a more confined footprint for repackaging luxury goods inside of the upscale district of Shibuya: Herzog and de Meuron’s bubble-wrapped Prada building in 2003; Toyo Ito and Associates’ branching clad exterior for Tods in 2004; and Creative Designers International’s expressionist Audi Forum in 2006. These buildings are modest in comparison to the monumental scale and proportion of properties, epitomized by Zaha Hadid’s undulating Dongdaeman Design Plaza in Seoul at the bulldozed site, forcing the relocation of 900 merchants (Meyer, 2014). Such accelerated economic modernization projects in these second-tier global cities appear as if watching the cityscape emerge through time-lapse photography. Urban developmentalism in these East Asian globalized cities derives its velocity and its form from being embedded in a different constellation of geo-politics – one in which Japan’s hegemony is waning in a reformed geography of power.
Finance capital still concentrates global command in the triumvirate global cities, while increasingly extending these functions across a wider range of urban places. In Tokyo finance capital is nation-bound, connected to manufacturing through intra-corporate networks. Through technocratic guidance state industrial and monetary policy elites fostered an export-oriented growth model protecting Japanese firms from direct foreign competition and reinforcing the felicitous relationship between Japanese banks and manufacturing. Urban developmentalism gave national capital a boost, but in doing so created the conditions for its undoing. Both the (trans)national and regional contexts shaped the rise and the decline of Tokyo as a global city.
The Rise and Decline of Tokyo: Urban (Post)Developmentalism?
To understand what makes a global city requires an account that goes beyond enumerating and quantifying the number of transnational corporate headquarters and banks clustered in an urban center. A global city is not analogous to a recipe – add ingredients, mix and stir. Rather, theories of global and globalizing cities must excavate shifting spatial logics of capitalism by considering the specific histories and geographies producing urban forms. Origin stories unfold narratives of events, actors, institutions, and places.
Tokyo can be read as a palimpsest. Stripping away layers of its own origin story reveals a Janus-like city: double-faced, both inward-oriented and extended outward. Tokyo’s story is best discerned from an inter-scalar geography of power perspective, focusing on the national(ist) in relationship to the region. An archaeology of Japanese empire uncovered colonial residues beneath the surface of the Japanese economic narrative, and archived the historical infrastructure, most emblematically represented by railroads and airports, undergirding Tokyo’s ascendance to global city status. The echoes of empire reverberated in Japan’s prewar colonialism and vis-à-vis its postwar ‘security’ relationship to the US.
Though Japan’s imperial ambitions were extinguished in the ashes of defeat, the Japanese state embarked on an ambitious modernization project in an effort to rebuild the war-torn nation and to ensure an adequate supply of ‘native-born’ labor channeled into burgeoning industrial sectors. The state’s investment in economic infrastructure and productive capacity, decimated during the Second World War, occurred in the context of that country’s imperial entanglements and complex histories bound to the region and to the United States’ Cold War security apparatus. Japan’s institutional architecture and infrastructural networks, prefigured in the war machine, were molded by the US Occupation forces that buttressed the Japanese bureaucracy and the establishment of the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) stronghold over the levers of government.
Against that backdrop the phoenix rose in a moment of disruption that might have changed urban policy and the broader political economy. Contentious politics and the settlement between labor, capital and the state made a difference in the way that Tokyo achieved global city status. At the time, protests and strikes seemed on the verge of radically challenging capitalism. The suppression of radical movements and the unions’ retreat into company bargaining institutions left a political vacuum in which the developmental coalition could operate. Company unionism submerged workers’ interests with that of the enterprise, narrowly negotiating the realization of company citizenship rights rather than rights to the city.
During the 1970s Narita Airport became the next battleground where the state and opposing forces clashed over the direction of urbanization. This transportation hub secured Tokyo’s position as a global city in the circuits of capital. It also symbolized the developmental state’s use of public works projects for partisan gain. Likewise, to explain Tokyo’s decline, it is necessary to interpret spatial logics at multiple scales. The Japanese state’s inward-focused but export-oriented growth model sheltering Japanese capital, and a relatively egalitarian bargain between labor and capital, became the source of its own undoing. Massive construction and public works’ projects, that had kept afloat jobs and wages, fueled an asset bubble undermining the terms of the consensus bargain. Bubblenomics, though not inevitable, has its origins in the closely intertwined relationship between financial institutions, state bureaucracy, and industrial development.
Neoliberal planning policies and national enabling legislation sought to revive Tokyo’s fortunes but faced a new competitive regional milieu. What makes global cities’ local spaces attractive has the contradictory effect of heating up housing prices, and ever more construction in the competition to win investments from the same transnational firms. In East Asia, municipal and national economic projects vie for dominance in designing and assembling technology of the future. Tokyo remains a global city despite seeing its fortunes decline, but the political bureaucratic project has little room to maneuver and an infrastructural fix no longer has a palliative effect for fueling economic growth after cooling off asset bubbles. Neoliberal policies inspire new spaces of exception where capital can operate according to off-shore principles on-shore. New strategic zones encompassing Tokyo and its surrounding areas are yet another quixotic quest by the local and national state to build itself out of the straightjacket of its own making. Similarly, zombie cities sprouting up in China raise questions about that country’s construction boom. At the same time ascendant cities in the region offer capital new geographically proximate locations for investment.
Future research must delineate inter-scalar linkages and resulting contradictions and tensions. The trans-border system of cities and regions occasion the rise of struggles over and in urban spaces. Tokyo, like Seoul, London, and New York, has witnessed the flare-up of contentious politics among dispossessed workers and the unemployed in public spaces, such as encampments in parks. What spaces of struggle will result from the trans-border shifting system of global cities? Can Seoul, Shanghai, or Hong Kong escape the fate of Tokyo? Has urban developmentalism reached its nadir? Or, are we headed into another phase of post-developmental urbanism? This special issue addresses many of these themes through detailed case studies in the region.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.