1 Introduction Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Christoph Brumann, Christian Dimmer and Evelyn Schulz Space, very generally speaking, has been a less salient category in social theory than time. Perhaps this is related to the crystallisation of social science in a historical period obsessed with progress and development, when theories about the evolution of species, the rise and future demise of capitalism and the advance of humankind from savagery to (Western) civilisation captured scholarly and laypeople imagination. But ever since as well, we have seen recurring predictions of a growing irrelevance of space and distance, all the way from Karl Marx in Grundrisse – ‘Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it’ (1973: 524) – to David Harvey’s diagnosis of a ‘time-space compression’ in contemporary society (1989). And who could deny that previously insurmountable distances have shrunk in the face of jet-speed transportation and lightning-speed information flows. Yet for all the proliferation of mass media, Web 2.0, mobile phones, cheap airfares and container shipping, the insight dawns on us that for most people, their immediate surroundings in nonvirtual reality continue to be experientially important. And often enough, we find space coveted and contested, rather than stripped of its political or economic relevance. So while an ‘end of history’ – viz. time – has been proclaimed, nobody has postulated an ‘end of space’ yet, and one instead sees claims to a ‘spatial turn’ (Soja 1989: 39, Jameson 1991: 154; for overviews see Bachmann-Medick 2006, Döring and Thielmann 2008, Hallet and Neumann 2009, Warf and Arias 2008) – sometimes also a ‘topographical’ or ‘topological turn’ (Weigel 2002, Hård et al. 2002) – across the social sciences and humanities, also in Japan (translated as kûkanteki tenkai). As with most other recent ‘turns’, there is some debate whether the magnitude of the actual reorientation justifies such a grandiose appelation, and a well-defined paradigm uniting all proponents is nowhere in sight. Geographers complain that under the buzzword, other disciplines try to reinvent theirs although they themselves may have invited such trespassing by often treating space ‘as obvious, as self evident and not really in need of further examination’ (Crang 2005: 199), as some from among their own ranks complain. Yet attention to space is without doubt growing, and increasingly across the social Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 2 C. Brumann, C. Dimmer and E. Schulz and cultural sciences it is seen from a relational perspective: space is not – or not only – simply Euclidean, an unproblematically given container in which human social and symbolic interaction unfolds; rather, it is strongly influenced by such interaction, if not produced by it in the first place. Space is not just there – to a significant extent, we ourselves make it, and social life is ‘both space-forming and space-contingent; a producer and a product of spatiality’ (Soja 1989: 129). The way we make space calls for scrutiny, then, and not just within the confines of a specialised discipline but in all kinds of social and cultural analysis. In this volume, we bring such a focus to the making of space in Japan. The uses of space in that country have certainly been widely studied, and great refinement has been detected in the ways space is apportioned, utilised and put on display in traditional architecture, gardening and the visual arts. In a more metaphorical way, too, social relations have been found to be undergirded by a keen sense of situation, position and distance. Admiration for such elaboration has rarely extended to Japanese cities, however. If at all, it is the efficient exploitation of limited space – such as in the notorious capsule hotels – that arouses popular attention here. Landmark buildings are celebrated too but Japanese urban spaces more generally are not widely praised for their sensory, environmental or democratic qualities, even when – for example in the human scale and homely feel that many an innercity neighbourhood manages to preserve – this could well be justified. Certainly, conditions for managing urban spaces have been difficult indeed: bringing close to 100 million villagers to the Japanese cities in less than a century – and one in which a war laid most of them to ashes – meant relentless, often mindless development and change beyond recognition. Where more housing units than in postwar Great Britain, France and West Germany taken together had to be built (Waswo 2002: 59), there was little room for reflection, and urban visions always lagged one step behind behind the chaotic realities of uncoordinated development. As a consequence, not only foreign observers but also the Japanese themselves often deplore the spatial degradation of their urban centres, sometimes to the point of overlooking the attractions these do hold. The growth curve is reaching a turning point now, however, as general population figures in Japan have entered a steep and long-term decline and many cities too are verging on shrinkage. Not all of them and not all their parts will be equally affected but for many a suburb, industrial area, commuter town or provincial centre the consequences will be quite dramatic (see Chapter 2 by Flüchter). Competition for residents, visitors, employers and investors is intensifying correspondingly, bringing new demands beyond those of quantity and functionality. After two decades of economic slump, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and with the unprecedented destruction and human suffering caused by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear contamination of 2011 to be dealt with, no overnight revolution can be expected, but the possibilities are certainly exciting. Japanese urbanites can finally afford to take a step back and assess the qualities of their surroundings more critically, and great change lies ahead for urban planning which – now that the pressure to provide basic infrastructure is subsiding – may finally come into its own. Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. Introduction 3 Two of us – Christoph Brumann and Evelyn Schulz – thought this to be a good moment for critical reflection, taking stock of the accumulated problems, valuing the accomplishments but also looking into the future of Japanese urban space. We did so during the eighteenth annual conference of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan (VSJF ), held 18–20 November 2005 in Königswinter near Bonn. As is customary for the association’s meetings, we sought an interdisciplinary and international approach, and the contributors’ backgrounds ranged from geography, economy and political science over anthropology and history to literature and film studies. The lively discussions encouraged us to publish a selection of papers, including an additional chapter by Christian Dimmer who also contributed substantially to these introductory notes. In all cases, this has involved comprehensive revisions that took their time and often left little of the original presentations but produced what we hope are much richer and more comprehensive accounts. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Theorising space Before introducing the individual chapters, let us briefly reiterate some of the main ideas behind the blossoming social scientific interest in space, in particular those of David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja who are often identified as key influences. One year before Lefebvre’s seminal The production of space (1991 [1974]), geographer David Harvey provided a theorisation of space that emphasises the difficulty of forming a proper conception of such a complex reality (1993 [1973]: 13). As his solution, he proposed a notion consisting of three somewhat overlapping but nonetheless distinct understandings. The first and most comprehensible – also most hegemonic – of these understandings is ‘absolute space’. Since Descartes’s and Newton’s days, we have been used to imagine space as a pre-existing, immutable and objectively mappable grid. Absolute space is seen as fully amenable to standardised measurement and calculations, and all uncertainties and ambiguities can be banished from it (Harvey 2005: 272). Second, there is a relative component to space, corresponding to the insights of Einsteinian and non-Euclidean geometry, which does not necessarily compromise our capacity for calculating and analytically controlling space. According to Harvey, the absolute view of space is too limited in that it does not account for the multiple geometries from which we can choose. The spatial frame furthermore depends ‘upon what it is that is being relativised and by whom’ (2005: 272). From the specific, relative perspective of the observer, distances can be represented – for example in two-dimensional maps – in terms of their absolute spatial extension. However, if one measures such distances in monetary costs, time, energy expended for transportation or topological relations, completely different representations of relative locations emerge. ‘We know, given the differential frictions of distance encountered on the earth’s surface, that the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily given by the way the legendary crow flies’ (2005: 273). Thus, the uniqueness of location defined by bounded territories in absolute space gives way to a multiplicity of Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 4 C. Brumann, C. Dimmer and E. Schulz locations that are equidistant from, for example, some central city location in a relative space (2005: 272). Third, the relational view of space suggests that in Leibniz’s sense, there is ‘no such thing as space or time outside of the processes that define them [. . .] Processes do not occur in space but define their own spatial frame’ (Harvey 2005: 272). Thus, social processes and their surrounding spatial frames stand in a dialectical, mutually reflexive relationship. This means that an event at a specific point in space cannot be solely understood by virtue of what exists at that very point alone. That point is rather part of a wider continuum of varying, disparate influences and their changing and dynamic relationship in the past, present and future (2005: 274). The concept of relational space-time is especially useful for understanding abstract concepts like identity, or the political role of collective memory. Such ideas cannot be be explained with reference to absolute space or relative space alone because the memories, subjectivities and values of the people inhabiting a place or those that external observers bring to it from their own life trajectories play an important role here. Harvey suggests that these three concepts of space shouldn’t be approached independently but that it is most productive to imagine them in constant interplay and dialectical tension. An event can thus have one dimension in abstract space, one in relative space and one in relational space at the same time: ‘[T]here is bound to be liminality about spatiality itself because we are inexorably situated in all three frameworks simultaneously, though not necessarily equally so’ (2005: 277). Harvey’s triad was not the first attempt at a more complex understanding of space. Three decades earlier, philosopher Ernst Cassirer had proposed that the ‘human world of space and time’ consists of three modes of spatial experience (1944: 48–61). A primitive organic spatial conception is a biological given and doesn’t have to be learned through individual experience in order to be mastered. This doesn’t include a mental picture or idea of space or of spatial relations yet (1944: 48–9), however, and this – perceptual space – is situated on a higher experiential level and refers to the ways our sensual spatial experience is neurologically processed and mentally registered (1944: 49). The third mode, abstract or symbolic space, which generates distinctive meanings through our readings and interpretations, is the highest level of spatial knowledge and the most difficult to understand (1944: 49–51). Almost certainly influenced by Cassirer’s ideas and overall more influential than Harvey’s conception is Henri Lefebvre’s The production of space (1991 [1974]; translated into Japanese in 2000), which shook the ground of human geography and sociology and pushed space on the agenda of cultural, literary and urban theory. For Lefebvre, space is the primary interpretative thread in order to understand the complexities of the modern world: space can no longer be looked upon as an ‘essence’, as an object distinct from the point of view of [. . .] ‘subjects’, as answering to a logic of its own. Nor can it be treated [. . .] as an empirically verifiable effect of a past, a Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. Introduction 5 Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. history, or a society. Is space indeed a medium? A milieu? An intermediary? It is doubtless all of these, but its role is less and less neutral, more and more active, both as instrument and as goal, as means and as end. Confining it to so narrow a category as that of ‘medium’ is consequently woefully inadequate. (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]: 411) In Soja’s words, space according to Lefebvre is thus ‘simultaneously objective and subjective, material and metaphorical, a medium and outcome of social life; actively both an immediate milieu and an originating presupposition’ (1996: 45). Fitting for a maverick Marxist thinker, Lefebvre’s main ambition is to bring space into the production-centred framework of historical materialism. ‘The “object” of interest must be expected to shift from things in space to the actual production of space’, he writes (1991 [1974]: 36–7, original emphasis), calling to mind Marxian admonitions against the fetishism of viewing commodities outside their production context. Just like Cassirer and Harvey, Lefebrve proposed the application of conceptual triads for this task. The most central one of these distinguishes ‘spatial practice’ (espace perçu) from ‘representations of space’ (espace conçu) and ‘space of representations’ (espace vécu), and while this triad is on an epistemological level (how do we know about space?), it corresponds to an ontological distinction (how is space?) between physical, mental and social space. Political geographer and urban planner Edward Soja – the single author most instrumental in popularising Lefebvre – rightly points out that the components of these triads are neither externally nor internally static or fixed but simultaneously real and imagined, concrete and abstract, material and metaphorical. Furthermore, none of them is privileged over the others, and all are equally important (Soja 1996: 65). Lefebvre is least clear about spatial practice but he ascribes it to societies, rather than individuals, and seems to see it as the particular, empirically observable behavioural routines these societies (or modes of production) impose on individuals through such means as housing, transportation, the separation of private and public life, etc. Spatial practice embraces both production and reproduction, and through performing properly within these processes, the members of a specific society acquire a certain level of spatial competence. (Clearly, we see a Basis here, complementing the Überbau of the other two ends of the triad.) Soja calls this process of producing the material form of social spatiality ‘firstspace’, which he sees both as medium and outcome of human activity and experience. It is a materialised, socially produced, empirical space that is ‘directly sensible and open [. . .] to accurate measurement and description’, providing ‘the traditional focus of attention in all the spatial disciplines’ (Soja 1996: 66). Representations of space, the second end of the triad, are equivalent to ‘conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocractic subdividers and social engineers’ (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]: 38), most often expressed through verbal or graphical means. ‘This is the dominant space in any society (or mode of production)’ (1991 [1974]: 38–9). These mental spaces are vital for the Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. 6 C. Brumann, C. Dimmer and E. Schulz production of space as they impose order and design on physical space and spatial practice. According to Soja, ‘[s]uch order is constituted via control over knowledge, signs and codes: over the means of deciphering spatial practice and hence over the production of spatial knowledge’ (1996: 67). Refering to these representations of space as ‘secondspace’, he agrees with Lefebvre that these are dominant in any society as they comprise the representations of power, ideology, control, discipline and surveillance. Space of representation, the third end according to Lefebvre, is space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’ (. . .). This is the dominated – and hence passively experienced – space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]: 39) Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Lefebvre sees it expressed mainly through non-verbal symbols and signs. Soja calls this spatial mode ‘thirdspace’ and stresses Lefebvre’s emphasis on unknowability, mystery, secretiveness and non-verbal sublimity of lived space in contrast to the neatly worked-out representations of space. It thus bears the potential for resistance against the dominant order, or for offering insight rather than purely scientific, positivistic views of the world (Soja 1996: 67–8). Lefebvre, Soja and Harvey all argue for assuming a dialectic interplay between the different types of space/spatial modes they identify, and it is by concentrating on that dialectic that we can gain deeper insight into a complex urban reality. ‘How space is depends on how we see (and imagine) it and vice versa’ (Toyoki 2004: 382). Thus, the injection of subjectivity into the equation enables the actor to (analytically) produce space. Consequently, Lefebvre warns us that [k]nowledge falls into a trap when it makes representations of space the basis for the study of ‘life’, for in doing so it reduces lived experience. The object of knowledge is, precisely, the fragmented and uncertain connection between elaborated representations of space on the one hand and representational spaces (along with their underpinnings) on the other; and this ‘object’ implies (and explains) a subject – that subject in whom lived, perceived and conceived (known) come together within a spatial practice. (1991 [1974]: 230) Through an oscillating motion, practice thus moves between conceived and imaginary space, between mediated reflections and lived experience, dialectically producing and reproducing identities, subjectivities and social organisation on the one hand and new spaces on the other (Toyoki 2004). According to Soja, this triad must be seen as ‘both outcome/embodiment and medium/presupposition of social relations and social structure’ (1989: 129). If we drive such social constructionism to extremes and allow for no space outside human subjective experience, we will run into cognitive and pragmatic Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Introduction 7 conundrums. For such reasons, there is reluctance among many to part entirely with the assumption of an objective, three-dimensional space existing outside ourselves and at least partially independent from our presence in, and observation of, it. But even such a pragmatic posture – out of sync with the theory of relativity and mathematical hyperspaces – can well be reconciled with attention not just to observable physical space but also to the uses we make of it and to the manifold ways in which space is imagined, represented, symbolically charged, ignored and denied in human societies. And it can also be reconciled with a sensibility for how this occurs not just in the dominant sectors of society and through the officially legitimised institutions, experts and discourses but also in everyday life and the semi-conscious routines of the common person. How these different levels take shape in a given society and how they interact with one another is an empirical rather than deductive question. Methodologically, this calls for a combined strategy that requires us to consider, first, the physical spaces as such and the messages encoded in squares, buildings, etc.; second, the written or graphical representations of space (not only for what they tell us about physical space itself but also about tacit representational conventions and underlying assumptions behind architectural drafts, maps, etc.); third, the actual behavioural interaction of people with the space in question, as it is amenable to empirical observation; and fourth, people’s reflections of their own and others’ spatial experience as they will reveal themselves through ethnographic observation, interviews, questionnaires and the study of written texts and documents. The same four aspects would also apply in historic research about space, with the obvious proviso that we must rely entirely on documents and archeological data where we can no longer interview the studied population. Much as Lefebvre, Soja, Harvey and others must be credited with stirring up things in geography and across the social sciences and humanities, it should be noted that such a sensibility to space and spatial experience is not entirely new to all these disciplines. Anthropology in particular has a venerable tradition of micro-observations of people’s relations to space. Much of these have been concerned with natural space, such as spatial orientation and its linguistic correlates among hunter-gatherers and pastoralists (e.g. Wassmann 1994, Widlok 1997, Istomin and Dwyer 2009), or with intimate social spaces, such as the different layers of inside and outside and the cosmological messages encoded in traditional houses (e.g. Bourdieu 1979: 133–5, Descola 1994 [1986]: 108–35, Lebra 1992). But there is also a significant anthropological literature on urban spaces, such as analyses of social behaviour in public space (e.g. Jankowiak 1993: 130–63, Low 1999), people’s perceptions of liveliness versus lifelessness in traditional and modern urban environments (e.g. Holston 1999, Zhang 2006: 470–2) or popular ideas about ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ city spaces (e.g. Dürr and Jaffe 2010). We are sure that there is also much to tap into in other disciplines, such as in psychology, as also in the Japanese literature and in much work that, while failing to mention space explicitly, speaks to it nonetheless. If we don’t take space simply as granted, as existing prior to social action, but as a complex, dynamically constructed concept and reality, we can begin to recognise meaningful links between Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. 8 C. Brumann, C. Dimmer and E. Schulz seemingly unrelated empirical phenomena, research domains and academic disciplines that haven’t been previously addressed, thus advancing a more comprehensive understanding of cities in Japan and elsewhere. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Introducing the chapters Building on such a theoretical orientation, most contributions to this volume bring the concern for the social sides of Japanese urban space to the empirical level of particular case studies, both historical and contemporary ones. As a necessary background to these micro-analyses, Winfried Flüchter summarises the recent trajectories bearing upon contemporary Japanese urban spaces in the first chapter. He shows that the dominant characteristics of twentieth-century development – comprehensive urbanisation, the formation of the three metropolises of Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka within a continuous urban band along the Pacific coast of Honshû, and the increasing concentration of all important functions in Tokyo, to the cost of Osaka and other rivals – must be supplemented by a closer look at the details. Then, it turns out that the spectacular demographic and urban expansion was selective already between 1960 and 2000 when a number of prefectures and also most cities with less than 200,000 inhabitants actually lost population. In the 2000s, the circle of shrinking prefectures (now a majority), cities (now also larger ones, including prefectural capitals) and commuter towns has further expanded, in line with the general decline of the Japanese population that began in 2006. The central areas of the biggest cities are still gaining rather than losing inhabitants, however, making for a substantial reurbanisation of the ‘craters’ caused by earlier suburbanisation. For the declining cities and urban areas, no full-fledged alternatives to the conventional planning models premised on growth have been established yet, and with diminishing economies of scale, sustaining depopulated towns will become ever more costly. Shrinkage also opens up opportunities, however, with user and cost pressure on urban spaces abating. Decision-makers, planners and ordinary inhabitants will have to actively confront these questions for which the inclusion of bottom-up processes and experimental approaches will be crucial. As Flüchter’s analysis makes very clear, demographic change will be a crucial factor in the future of Japanese cities, but it will affect them and their constituent parts to very different degrees, urging us to be attentive to local variation. Flüchter’s chapter sets the stage for the following four in which Lefebvre’s ‘spatial practice’ and ‘representational space’ hold prime of place, as they all deal with planned interventions in urban space and its social concomitants. Looking back in historical time, Anke Scherer alerts us to the power aspect in the design of buildings and urban spaces – their capacity to ‘communicate, convince and even coerce’ and finds it particularly salient in Japan’s ill-fated colonial expansion to the Asian continent. Manchuria was one of the chief areas of pre-war imperialist ambitions, and from the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 onward, the governmentcontrolled South Manchuria Railway Company served as a bridgehead for colonial subjugation. This culminated in the 1932 declaration of independence of the Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Introduction 9 puppet state Manshûkoku, nominally ruled by the last emperor of China (from the Manchurian Qing dynasty) but in actual fact controlled by Japan. In the concession territories, major railway stations, squares, hotels and bank buildings designed after Western models transmitted a message of modernisation and development, and after 1932, the new capital Xinjing – present-day Shenyang – saw the rapid spread of awe-inspiring government and military buildings. As in other colonial territories such as the French (Rabinow 1989), the vast open spaces provided Japanese planners and architects with unprecedented opportunities and the testing ground for the creation of an ‘East Asian Modern’. Curiously, the vestiges often survive today since, ideological considerations aside, the communist regime could ill afford to leave the solid structures unused. Christoph Brumann moves us back to the present even though in his case of Kyoto, the past is never very far away. In the much glorified ancient capital of Japan, the advance of high-rise architecture into the scenic historic landscape – although much deplored – appeared unstoppable until fairly recently. The weak planning authority of Japanese municipalities, greedy developers and the sheer inertia of ordinary citizens were contributing factors. Underneath, however, lay the tacit but widely shared premise that any urban space is predominantly private, either through legal ownership or through the moral authority attributed to next-door neighbours. All the more astonishing is the speed with which the city of Kyoto adopted a new building code in 2007. The new regulations for building heights, design, signage and the protection of views are the strictest in Japan, and public discourse highlights long-term collective benefits rather than private gains and losses. Revolutionary though this move is, recognising public rights over urban space to an unprecedented degree, the established political patterns and their top-down orientation have not been overturned: the new regulations were brought about by national-level legal changes and ministry assistance, local business leaders’ demands, the city administration’s bureaucracy and the input of expert councils, not a broad debate with the many concerned citizens. Crucial as the critical citizens’ groups impact on public opinion and key actors has been, theirs remained an indirect influence only. Christian Dimmer continues the discussion of public space and explicitly works with the notion of its social production, taking space as not a fixed but dynamically constructed, ever-changing notion. Outlining an intellectual history of the trope of ‘public space’, he asks why it has been critically underplayed for so long in Japan despite its centrality as a theoretical concept in Western urban theory. The recent burgeoning of the concept in Japanese planning discourses, popular media and urban everyday life begs for explanation too, however, and the contributing actors and agencies must be identified. In pursuit of these general questions, he focuses on one specific kind of public space – the ‘publicly-owned private space’ or POPS. Produced through incentive planning instruments at the interface of private and public interests, POPS are freely accessible spaces that, however, are privately owned. In the course of time, these hybrids have become increasingly sophisticated. Dimmer argues that by focusing on them, it becomes possible to transcend the limitations of conventional Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 10 C. Brumann, C. Dimmer and E. Schulz government-centred research frameworks and encompass the values and meanings attributed to public space by market and civil-society actors. By comparing the progressive, local government-initiated planning approach of Yokohama City with that of Tokyo’s Ôtemachi, Marunouchi and Yûrakuchô district where the resident business community has been the chief player in providing widenend, shop-lined sidewalks and indoor plazas, he is able to demonstrate the complex forces informing the social production of the notion of public space in contemporary urban Japan. Carolin Funck, Tsutomu Kawada and Yoshimichi Yui critically assess several recent attempts to involve ordinary citizens in urban planning processes, comparing a number of prominent Japanese and German cases. This is an inquiry into the everyday functioning of civil society in two economically similar states with different planning regimes and traditions. The authors find that in Nishisuma and Higashi-Nada in Kobe, resident-based activities still tend to fill the gaps left by a retreating state, and the NPO organisations founded there have trouble securing continuous funding. More public attention has been directed to the protest activities and organisations against a new road plan for the historic harbour town of Tomonoura in Hiroshima prefecture. Germany, through the legal form of the Verein (voluntary association), offers better legal conditions for civil-society initiatives than Japan, but in the conversion of former military buildings in Freiburg into a model district, not all bottom-up proposals were realised, and the NPO itself ended up bankrupt. The so-called district management experiment in Berlin went furthest in empowering citizens, all the way to budgetary decision-making, but here again, the phasing out of public funding made itself felt. The authors reveal a number of common problems but also a growth and diversification of participation forms, and they find that the channels of communication between citizens and local governments are improving in both countries. A second group of chapters is concerned with what is ‘space of representations’ in Lefebvre’s scheme, that is the lived space of human social interaction that may, or may not, stand in a harmonious relationship with planned space. Here again, we have a historical opener in which Katja Schmidtpott focuses on an ubiquitous element in the social appropriation of urban spaces, the neighbourhood associations that despite their weak legal status exist in all Japanese cities large and small. Widely studied throughout the social sciences, they are often looked up to as a possible answer to social issues such as aging populations and shrinking households. Common lay and academic stereotype sees this bottom-up form of social organisation as a remnant of village society in urban contexts. Actual historical studies, however, paint a more differentiated picture, and Schmidtpott herself turns to early twentieth-century Tokyo, that is the formative period of present-day neighbourhood associations. She finds little continuity with pre-Meiji urban communities, and initial moves came from landed elites eager to provide basic services demanded by local governments rather than from a general craving for local community. Neighbourhood associations with roughly similar infrastructural and social roles as today did not become a general Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Introduction 11 phenomenon before the 1920s, and here again, vested interests – such as in voter support for local elections – were the driving forces. It was mainly financial pressure that brought neighbourhood associations to finally raise membership fees, open up to all residents of their territory and invoke community and family ideals for neighbourly life. Predictably, this didn’t convince everyone, and a steady stream of new residents and diverging class interests led to widespread abstention, particularly by those (e.g. factory workers) who had alternative ways to organise. Projecting the purposely inclusive and largely recreational neighbourhood associations of today into the past, this means, amounts to writing historical fiction. Paul Waley follows up with modern-day civil society activities in Tokyo and addresses the continuing struggle between advancing global modernity and the wish to retain the existing, historically grown urban landscape with all its identity values. Diagnosing an absence of state engagement in urban conservation, he explores a number of urban sites in Tokyo’s Taitô ward. Stasis and neglect are dominant for Ueno Hill with its famous museums and historic sites and for the Sensôji temple area, with official policies silencing the underprivileged minorities resident in the area. The Yanaka district, a well-preserved historical area, is the field of activity for a number of non-confrontational groups and initiatives, with all their typical limitations. In contrast, Shinobazu Pond below Ueno Hill did see more confrontation, and plans to build a garage underneath it had to be shelved in 1997 on account of citizen protest. This frustrated the hopes of the local shopkeepers’ association but fulfilled those of a coalition of local residents, university professors and environmentalists who had opposed the facility. Waley concludes that civil-society groups face difficulties in effective place-making, as long as the state does not get involved more substantially and provide a more supportive legal and administrative framework for their bottom-up activities. Narrowing down the focus even further, the next two chapters focus on the individual experience of urban space. Ingrid Getreuer-Kargl brings a concern for social hierarchy to the micro-level of individual persons who, by inhabiting urban spaces and moving through them, appropriate them in more or less conscious ways. She starts out from theoretical considerations about the social construction of space and how these reflect power and gender relations, and building on the concept of ‘spacing’ as introduced by sociologist Martina Löw and on Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of ‘bodily hexis’, she explores the gendered appropriation of space in a suburban train station in the Tokyo area. Her close-up empirical observations reveal that gender differentiation in bodily comportment is least pronounced in the access area where instrumental tasks – buying tickets, getting through the control gates, hurrying for the train – occupy the commuters’ minds. But when waiting on the platform and when sitting or standing in the often crowded trains, the attention to one’s body posture increases. Gendered expectations of good manners take over then so that men sit, stand and move in more relaxed and also spatially more expansive ways than women who are careful to present an upright posture, keep legs and knees together and draw in elbows. Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 12 C. Brumann, C. Dimmer and E. Schulz Interesting also, when forming groups, women’s bodies invariably face each other in a circle whereas men appear to feel less of a need to demonstrate their togetherness in physical ways. As Getreuer-Kargl clearly demonstrates, social hierarchies inform even the most mundane levels of appropriating urban space, and for the time being, they are still premised on a male ‘right of place’ in many walks of life. Evelyn Schulz turns to the Benjaminian figure of the flâneur, the urban stroller, and his/her presence in literary writings on Tokyo in modern and premodern times. Many a guidebook, for instance, is conceived as a series of strolls through Tokyo, and the reader-stroller then becomes the ‘diachronic flâneur’ in Benjamin’s sense who is sensitive to his own memories and the traces of others in the places s/he walks. The celebrated master of the flâneur literature is novelist Nagai Kafû who, in describing his own extensive walks through the city, juxtaposed modern Tokyo with premodern Edo, lamenting the gradual loss of the latter’s glory. Other authors such as Kimura Shôhachi and Kobayashi Nobuhiko followed in his footsteps, and so does a contemporary genre of guidebooks that lead the reader to the roji (alleyways), celebrating them as spaces of everyday life and intimacy. Such books are of crucial importance for the mediation and representation of urban spaces, which can be regarded as containers of living patterns that existed long before Tokyo became the centre of the Japanese economy with all its negative side effects such as rising property prices, environmental pollution, traffic congestion, sprawl, enormous growth in population and industries as well as isolation and anonymity in this densely populated megacity. What is nascent here is a counter-discourse to urban modernism, and Schulz sees great potential for the figure of the flâneur in future reconceptions of Japanese cities. In a concluding chapter that opens up our vision to the future of urban spaces, André Sorensen muses about the consequences of Japan’s ‘grand social experiment in population decline’ for urban spaces, predicting a profound, often problematic, but potentially also beneficial impact. He is convinced that with their tradition of mixed usage, many inner-city neighbourhoods in Japan could be among the most liveable urban areas anywhere in the world. But to succeed in this respect, they have to prevail in the ever more intense contest for retaining and attracting population. Otherwise, the decay of inner-city buildings and areas, urban fringes with uncoordinated development aborted halfway, and entire ghost towns in the place of former industrial and regional cities appear possible. The question of liveability becomes increasingly central in public discourse and urban planning which in itself is a major change. There is still the danger, however, that any successes in one place will be to the cost of others in what is a zero-sum game for the ever fewer remaining Japanese. As the above chapters indicate, this is without doubt a lively time for Japanese cities and the spaces they comprise, with uncharted trajectories lying ahead. We are convinced that many of the dimensions we address in this volume – power versus participation, public versus private, memory versus amnesia – will remain central to their understanding. We hope to demonstrate that an open-minded, Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. Introduction 13 multi-disciplinary approach giving equal attention to the physical aspects of urban spaces and to their social significance has much to contribute to the study of contemporary cities. Technical note: For the Romanisation of Japanese terms, we use the modified Hepburn system. Long vowels are indicated by a circumflex except in the city names Tôkyô, Ôsaka, Kôbe and Kyôto where we henceforth omit them. Rendering consonants as in English, vowels as in Spanish or Italian, and double vowels as distinct sounds brings you reasonably close to the Japanese pronunciation. Japanese family names precede given names. Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Alison Elks, Leanne Hinves, Hannah Mack, Ed Needle, Stephanie Rogers, Claire Toal, Allie Waite and the series editors for their dedicated work on this book. Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. References Bachmann-Medick, D. (2006). ‘Spatial turn’, in D. 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(eds) (2009) Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur: Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn, Bielefeld: Transcript. Hård, M., Lösch, A. and Verdicchio, D. (eds) (2002) Transforming spaces: The topological turn in technology studies, published online at www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/fileadmin/gradkoll//Publikationen/transformingspaces.html. Harvey, D. (1993 [1973]) Social justice and the city, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Harvey, D. (1989) The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change, Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2005) ‘Space as a keyword’, in N. Castree and D. Gregory (eds) David Harvey: A critical reader, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Holston, J. (1999) ‘The modernist city and the death of the street’, in S.M. Low (ed.) Theorizing the city: The new urban anthropology reader, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Istomin, K.V. and Dwyer, M.J. (2009) ‘Finding the way: A critical discussion of anthropological theories of human spatial orientation with reference to reindeer herders of Northeastern Europe and Western Siberia’, Current Anthropology, 50: 29–49. Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42. 14 C. Brumann, C. Dimmer and E. Schulz Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jankowiak, W.R. (1993) Sex, death, and hierarchy in a Chinese city: An anthropological account, New York: Columbia University Press. Lebra, T.S. (1992) ‘The spatial layout of hierarchy: Residential style of the modern Japanese nobility’, in T.S. Lebra (ed.) Japanese social organization, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991 [1974]) The production of space, Oxford: Blackwell. Low, S.M. (1999) ‘Spatializing culture: The social production and social construction of public space in Costa Rica’, in S.M. Low (ed.) Theorizing the city: The new urban anthropology reader, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin. Rabinow, P. (1989) French modern: Norms and forms of the social environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Soja, E.W. (1989) Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory, London: Verso. Soja, E.W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places, Oxford: Blackwell. Toyoki, S. (2004) ‘Constructive spatial criticism on critical spatial construction’, Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 4: 376–84. Warf, B. and Arias, S. (eds) (2008) The spatial turn: Interdisciplinary perspectives, London: Routledge. Wassmann, J. (1994) ‘The Yupno as post-Newtonian scientists: The question of what is ‘natural’ in spatial description’, Man, 29: 645–66. Waswo, A. (2002) Housing in postwar Japan: A social history, London: RoutledgeCurzon. Weigel, S. (2002) ‘Zum “topographical turn”: Kartographie, Topographie und Raumkonzepte in den Kulturwissenschaften’, KulturPoetik, 2(2): 151–65. Widlok, T. (1997) ‘Orientation in the wild: The shared cognition of Hai||om Bushpeople’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 3: 317–32. Zhang, L. (2006) ‘Contesting spatial modernity in China’, Current Anthropology, 47: 461–84. Urban Spaces in Japan : Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Christoph Brumann, and Evelyn Schulz, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/waseda-ebooks/detail.action?docID=981851. Created from waseda-ebooks on 2021-11-03 09:33:42.