Urban Planning as an Urban Problem: The Reconstruction of Tokyo after the Great Kanto Earthquake

Jeffrey E. Hanes

The massive earthquake that devastated Kobe in 1995 was a shocking occurrence. Some 6200 people died in the catastrophe, and the survivors were left to ponder its causes and consequences. Most accounts of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake have characterized it as anatural disaster sudden, shocking eruption of natural forces beyond human control. However -a convenient and common this explanation may be, however, it is also extremely misleading. For, while the earthquake event itself was natural, much of the disaster that followed was human-made. As Miyamoto Ken and many others have observed,The quake was a natural disaster. But ichi fires spread and rescue work was delayed owing to failures in both national and regional fireprevention preparations as well as a lack of safety precautions by companies. This ultimately produced a human-made disaster(Miyamoto 1996, 13). It was not merely the lack of emergency preparedness that turned the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake into a catastrophe, however. Drawing our attention to the many infrastructural and structural failures that Kobe suffered, Miyamoto and others have carried their diagnosis of this human-made disasterone critical step further (Miyamoto 1996, 8). For his part, Miyamoto has reminded us that Japan postwar commitment to rapid urban industrial growth was frequently s made at the expense of human safety. Noting that the metropolitan conurbations of Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka have been developed as vessels of industrial capitalism and are now surrounded by volatile petrochemical plants, he has exhorted the Japanese leadership to rethink the nation developmental priorities. Echoing Miyamoto assessment of the Kobe disaster asa s s tragedy that seems to foreshadow the demise of Japan as a great economic superpower (Miyamoto 1995, 86), Gavan McCormack has wondered aloud whether Japan will actually set a new developmental course before it is too late.It remains to be seen,writes McCormack,whether the Kobe shocks will serve to shift Japan from the treadmill track of growth, consumption, and waste onto the very different track of sustainable development(McCormack 1996, 16). While there is much evidence to suggest that government, business, and the public all have taken the challenge of sustainable development seriously, the real question is whether they have

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taken it seriously enough. As of 1996, Miyamoto insisted that they had not.Priority has been given to restoration of railway lines, highways, and port facilities,he observed. Buthousing and welfare services have received little attention(Miyamoto 1996, 16). Since 1996, of course, central, prefectural, and local authorities have confronted these pressing social concerns. Indeed, they have approachedreconstruction planning(fukk keikaku) as a consultative process focused on the local community, thus placing Japan on the path toward a new democratic paradigm of urban planning. Despite their seeming enthusiasm for community reconstruction in Kobe, however, the authorities have failed to achieve many of their objectives in the critical areas ofhousing reconstruction(jtaku fukk) andsocial welfare(shakai fukushi). As of 1998, the Governor of Hyogo Prefecture was compelled to admit that social reconstruction continued to lag far behind infrastructural reconstruction (Ritsumeikan Daigaku Shinsai Fukk Kenky Purojiekuto 1998, 351). In its 1998 report on earthquake reconstruction in Kobe, the Ritsumeikan University Earthquake Disaster Research Project confirmed the Hyogo Prefectural Governor disturbing s findings:Today, three years after the earthquake disaster, by means of the nation technological s and financial power, thehardelements of reconstruction such as infrastructure have been largely achieved. But where urban life is concerned, as represented especially by housing, numerous disaster victims remain mired in troubling circumstances(Ritsumeikan Daigaku Shinsai Fukko Kenkyu Purojiekuto 1998, 341). Given the palpable enthusiasm of central, prefectural, and local authorities for community reconstruction, it might seem surprising that they made so little progress between 1995 and 1998. In the following essay, however, I will argue that this eventuality was quite predictable. In brief, I will contend that the planners who engineered Kobe reconstruction were little different s ideologically from those who engineered Tokyo reconstruction following the Great Kanto s Earthquake in 1923. Not only did these two distant generations of planners proceed from shared assumptions about the nature of modernization and progress, in fact, their respective critics shared similar reservations about the application of these assumptions to the enterprise of reconstruction. The planners of 1923 treated reconstruction as a means of restoring Japan prewar great power s status, while those of 1995 treated it as a means of enhancing its postwar superpower status; the critics of Tokyo road-centered reconstruction called for the creation oflivable cities s (sumigokochi yoki toshi), while those of Kobe infrastructure-centered reconstruction s anticipated the advent of asustainable society(susteinaburu sosaietei). Although the rhetoric changed between 1923 and 1995, then, the basic issue did not. In both cases, planners paid lip service to community reconstruction, but respectively treated Tokyo and Kobe as economic objects; and in both cases, the critics of these planners attempted unsuccessfully to press the community reconstruction agenda by redefining cities as social subjects. What makes it possible for us to make such an explicit comparison between these distant

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Urban Planning as an Urban Problem: The Reconstruction of Tokyo after the Great Kanto EarthquakeJeffrey E. Hanes

reconstruction projects is the explicit nature of the historical record. In 1923 Tokyo, as in 1995 Kobe, in the wake of catastrophe, the authorities and their critics easily and often dramatically betrayed their most deeply-held ideological presuppositions. If we can take the disaster researcher Anthony Oliver-Smith at his word, then it is not the least surprising that people wore their values on their sleeves. As Smith has poignantly observed,Disasters, as few other research subjects, throw theoretical and practical issues into high relief; the first, by their tendency to lay bare the essential features and processes of social and cultural organization and, second, by the urgency of the needs of those threatened or stricken by disasters for effective prevention, protection, relief or reconstruction(Oliver-Smith 1986, 3). The Great Kanto Earthquake was a catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions. Disaster struck at 11:58 AM on September 1, 1923. Shaken by a massive earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Japanese scale-a jolt strong enough to stop the clock on the Central Meteorological Observatorythe great cities of Tokyo and Yokohama were brought to their knees. While the earthquake wrought considerable damage, however, the fires that followed produced a holocaust. Many of these fires were ignited by overturned braziers lit minutes earlier for noontime tea. They spread rapidly through the densely-constructed, wooden neighborhoods of Tokyo and Yokohama, compelling hundreds of thousands of urban residents to seek refuge where they could. Setting nearly half the city of Tokyo ablaze, these raging fires ravaged the city for three full days. When the smoke cleared and government officials assessed the damage, they were awestruck. In Tokyo alone, nearly 3500 hectares were laid to waste, and some 310,000 dwellings were destroyed. The homeless numbered 1,300,000-roughly 58 percent of the city population-and an s estimated 70,500 people had lost their lives. More than half of the dead, perhaps as many as 44,000, had been trapped in an open compound near Rygoku. Asphyxiated and incinerated by a rogue firestorm, the unidentifiable victims were later cremated en masse. In the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, as fires raged across the city, Tokyo was nothing short of a living hell. Mass hysteria ruled, and some panicked residents were ultimately driven to mass murder. Amidst the chaos of the conflagration, rumors flew wildly and conspiracy theories ran rampant. One such rumor, which spread to a populace half-crazed by aftershocks and firestorms-of a Korean conspiracy to set fires and poison wells-turned neighborhood watch groups into mobs of vigilantes bent on the crudest form of street justice. Untold thousands of Koreans, Chinese, and other innocent victims were brutally murdered, their battered corpses heaped indiscriminately atop the piles of crushed, incinerated, asphyxiated, and drowned bodies that littered the city (Nakajima 1995). In an effort to capture the magnitude of the catastrophe, the Tokyo Municipal Office later produced a dramatic graphic that compared the conflagration in Tokyo to the world most s infamous urban fires (See Figure 1). Significantly, however, what the authorities chose to highlight

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was not the tragic loss of life but the massiveloss of wealth(Tokyo Municipal Office 1933, 97) that Tokyo experienced. Here, as they silently compared notes with their counterparts in Europe and America, the authorities tacitly identified Tokyo as an economic entity by identifying the earthquake as an economic disaster. Equally significantly, the authorities doctored the human disaster narrative. Suppressing photographs of the holocaust at Ryogoku and censoring accounts of the city-wide lynching of Koreans, among other things, they systematically sanitized the human suffering that defined this social catastrophe (Kaizsha 1924, 70-71). From the outset, state authorities did their best to put a political spin on the earthquake calculated to absolve them of any blame for the disaster and thus to give them free rein in setting the agenda for reconstruction. The official account of the Great Kanto Earthqnuake poigantly characterized the event as acase of force majeure...beyond the control of human agency -a

LONDON

SAN FRANCISCO

CHICAGO

TOKYO

Cities London Chicago San Francisco Tokyo

Year 1666 Sept. 2-6 1871 Oct. 8-9 1906 April 18-21 1923 Sept. 1-3

Butnt Area (sq.m.) 1,768,603 8,595,880 12,165,344 33,477,836

Loss of Wealth yen 107,300,000 330,000,000 750,000,000 5,506,386,034

Figure 1.Burnt Areas of the World Great Fires Source: The Reconstruction of Tokyo (1933)

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Urban Planning as an Urban Problem: The Reconstruction of Tokyo after the Great Kanto EarthquakeJeffrey E. Hanes

terrible outburst of the forces which may at any time overwhelm a nation.The state went on to declare the Great Kanto Earthquake themost horrible [disaster] ever know since authentic history began,ultimately pronouncing it agreat holocaustthat hadarrested the progress of national development.Having thus identified the Great Kanto Earthquake as an unavoidable natural disaster-and one that had struck at the heart of the modern nation-the authorities initially concluded thatthe utmost that could be hoped for in the circumstances was to restrict the scope of the misery and to devise a conscientious programme of relief(Bureau of Social Affairs 1926, iii). Notwithstanding their fatalistic public assessment of the earthquake and its aftermath, and their expansive expression of compassion for disaster victims, the Japanese leadership ultimately exhibited far less concern with human relief than with material reconstruction. They ignored the outcry ofagrarianists and moralists,who cast the catastrophe asa heavenly punishment for sybaritic urbanites,summarily rejecting their call for capital relocation (Watanabe 1984). And they evinced only superficial interest in more temperate popular proposals to invest inland readjustment(kukaku seiri) schemes designed to promote residential livability. Instead proposing a three billion yen program for capital reconstruction that anticipated the re-creation of Tokyo as a modern metropolis, the newly-appointed Home Minister Got Shimpei seized the moment. Got proposal prevailed for a number of reasons, including his ample political influence, but s most importantly because it resonated with the nation continuing commitment to rapid economic s development. When the Great Kanto Earthquake laid waste to Tokyo in 1923, it threw the enterprise of national progress into high relief. After all, the disaster came on the heels of the First World War, when Japan had stepped up industrial production, stepped into international markets, and stepped through to such booming economic success that it was transformed into a global power. Because Tokyo was central to that success-as the eastern metropolitan anchor of an emerging industrial conurbation that extended to Osaka along the Tokaido Belt-the Great Kanto Earthquake loomed particularly large in the minds of the Japanese leadership. Fully two-thirds of Japan industrial production was concentrated in cities along this conurbation (Hanes 1993, 62), s and this simple fact impelled officials such as Got to re-conceive the imperial capital as a modern industrial metropolis. As Got saw it, the Great Kanto Earthquake had not merely struck down the imperial capital but struck at the socio-economic epicenter of the modern nation-state. Accordingly, he identified Tokyo reconstruction with the hopes and dreams of Japan itself. s By September 12, 1923, the imperial government had made its position on reconstruction crystal clear. As theImperial Edict on Reconstructionproclaimed,Tokyo, the capital of the empire, has been looked upon by the people as the centre of political and economic activities and the fountainhead of the cultural advancement of the nation. With the unforeseen visit of the

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catastrophe, the city has entirely lost its former prosperous contours but retains, nevertheless, its position as the national capital. The remedial work, therefore, ought not to consist merely in the reparation of the quondam metropolis, but, in ample provisions for the future development of the city, completely to transform the avenues and streets(Bureau of Social Affairs 1926, frontispiece). In short, the imperial government did not hope to transform Tokyo into a glittering capital, nor a livable city, but a fluid metropolis. This imperial entreaty to build anational capitalworthy of the distinction, not simply to repair thequondam metropolis,loudly echoed Got original proposal. This proposal, in turn, s virtually reiterated the advice of Charles A. Beard, former director of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research and an internationally-renowned champion of scientific urban management. As the story goes, Got had sent Beard an urgent cable on September 7-some say, the firstofficial newsof the earthquake outside of Japan-that read as follows:Earthquake and fire destroyed the greater part of Tokyo [Stop]. Thoroughgoing reconstruction needed [Stop]. Please come immediately if possible, even for a short stay[Stop] (Beard 1923, v). Beard, who had returned to New York just months earlier from a field study of municipal government in Japan commissioned by Got, then Mayor of Tokyo, reportedly packed his bags and sailed immediately for Yokohama. Leaving nothing to chance at this critical juncture, however, he cabled ahead these urgent instructions:Lay out new streets, forbid building without street lines, unify railway stations(Quoted in Cybriwsky 1991, 82). In short, Beard said exactly what Got hoped to hear: that the foremost challenge of urban reconstruction was to make Tokyo more efficient. The position taken by Beard and Got on the reconstruction of Tokyo, which was the same position subsequently adopted by the state in the emperor name, reveals how the planners of s reconstruction conceptualized national progress. As the Home Office careful justification of the s reconstruction imperative demonstrates, the version of progress that won the day was starkly materialistic. The argument was made in the following way:The almost total destruction of Tokyo, the capital of the Empire, and the complete destruction of Yokohama, the foremost of our leading ports, inflicted upon the nation a cruel wound and one not easy to heal. Japan ranked with the principal Powers of the world after the Russo-Japanese War and, later, while all the European nations suffered terrible losses in the Great War, she emerged from it scatheless. She enjoyed, moreover, a phenomenal boom in her business and industry, rose to the position of one of the great Powers of the World and continued to be a dominant factor in the Pacific. Suddenly an act of God struck her a terrible blow, and the devastation of the metropolis and the prosperous cities and towns greatly affected her international position. When we take this fact into consideration, we are bound to believe that the restoration of the Imperial Capital is necessary for the restoration of the Empire(Bureau of Social Affairs 1926, 33).

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Urban Planning as an Urban Problem: The Reconstruction of Tokyo after the Great Kanto EarthquakeJeffrey E. Hanes

This extraordinary national[istic] narrative, which traces Japanrise as a s Power of the world to its commercial and industrial growth, then goes on to suggest that itsinternational position has been seriously compromised by thedevastation of the metropolis,leaves little to the imagination. Whither goes the metropolis, center of commerce and industry, there follows the nation and the empire: This was the state message, pure and simple. What is more, the s metropolisdescribed in this scenario was not viewed as a dynamic urban community but as an abstract economic entity. The post-earthquake reconstruction priorities exhibited by Japan in 1923 mirror those that prevail today-not merely in Kobe but more generally in cases of disaster relief and reconstruction across the world. As Kenneth Hewitt observes,relief and reconstruction are shown to be often disproportionately focused upon restoring, and more than restoring, the infrastructural arrangements of the more powerful institutions of the economy, the state and international system, rather than direct responses to the needs of victims(Hewitt 1983). Where the reconstruction of Tokyo was concerned, this was undeniably the case. The architects, planners, and engineers who implemented the reconstruction program aimed not merely torestorepreviousinfrastructural arrangementsbut to strengthen and solidify these arrangements. Looking past the dire condition of disaster victims and toward this grand material objective, they devoted themselves to the task of increasing the efficiency of the metropolis spatial economy. s From the outset, Got was the guiding force behind reconstruction of the imperial capital. Serving simultaneously as Home Minister and as director of the Bureau for Reconstruction of the Imperial Capital, he wielded immense power and influence. Having served earlier as the Governor General of Taiwan as well as the Mayor of Tokyo-and being a man who freely walked the halls of national power-Got could forcefully promote his reconstruction agenda. Moreover, he came to his new charge as a man on a mission. As Governor General of Taiwan, he had been able to initiate a sweeping program of urban modernization in the capital of Taipei, and he brought this bracing experience to bear on reconstruction planning for the Japanese metropole (Mochida 1983, 4-11). Two years earlier, indeed, as Mayor of Tokyo, Got had unsuccessfully introduced a comprehensive metropolitan plan whose 800 million yen price tag was so unbelievable that it won him the nicknameBig Talker(Koshizawa 1992, 8-11). Where this stillborn proposal left off, Got s reconstruction plan began. The first sketch of Got reconstruction plan, presented to the Bureau soon after its s formation, illustrates the functionalist assumptions on which his vision of the new imperial capital rested. In his mind, and in those of the urban planners he soon employed, Tokyo was first and foremost the pulsing center of the modern nation-state. While most earlier planners had put great emphasis on the symbolic function of Tokyo as teito (the imperial capital), Got stressed its socioeconomic function as taito (the great capital). His sketch of the new and improved capital

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encompassed undeveloped land on the outskirts of the old capital and highlighted the creation of a network of new roads designed to grease the wheels of commerce and industry. Closely modeled after the idealized vision forNew Tokyoproduced in 1921 by Fukuda Shigeyoshi, a city engineer who subsequently rose high in the ranks of the Bureau, Got plan was a sophisticated s functionalist fantasy (Ishida 1992, 65-87). Equally fantastic was Got proposal to implement this s scheme. He initially proposed that the government buy up all the city land and, after instituting a s proper plan, that they simply sell the land back. (Nihon Toshi Keikaku Gakkai 1992, 156). In 1923, when Got set up the Bureau for Reconstruction, he placed urban planners at center stage. In so doing, he thrust an unlikely cast of characters into the national limelight. Still in its infancy at the time of the earthquake, the planning profession had been born out of concern in the late 1910s to guide Japan virtually unchecked metropolitan development. Although the s profession only began to grow following the enactment of the Urban Planning Law in 1919, Got offered its practitioners what he presented as thegrand opportunity to build an imperial capital (Quoted in Koshizawa 1991, 38). To their credit, the Bureau urban planners rose to the occasion, s preparing maps, drawings, charts, surveys, statistics, manifestoes, and research monographs. Translating their newly-acquired expertise into 468 million yen worth of urban projects, they s guided the reconstruction program through to completion in 1930. It is no exaggeration to say that urban planners dictated the course and the character of Tokyo reconstruction as a modern s metropolis, and, for this reason, it is important to understand what made them tick. What distinguished urban planners from most other urban visionaries who burst onto the scene during the excitement of Tokyo reconstruction was their dedication to scientific s management. Guided by the samescientific, utilitarianassumptions that continue to govern the planning profession today, they confronted the ravages of the Great Kanto Earthquake with disconcertingly clinical objectivity. Their perspective as planners prevented them from attributing the disaster either to supernatural intervention or to human irrationality. Too scientific to blame the earthquake on agiant catfish(namazu) and too utilitarian to blame the fires that followed on the fatalism of Tokyo inhabitants, who continued to (re)construct flimsyfire traps s (yakeya) following each new disaster in their earthquake- and fire-prone city, urban planners identified the Great Kanto Earthquake as a simple, unavoidable accident of nature. Not unlike the contemporary disaster planners discussed by geographer Kenneth Hewitt, Japanese urban planners worked from the basic premise that human action is fundamentally rational and utilitarian. To quote Hewitt on the matter, plannerscannot contemplate human action as leading to destruction, to the collapse of institutions or disorganisation of the space economy. [Their] materialism assumes that human activity derives fromself-interestwhose first , rule issurvivalor at least belongs to an underlying principle of adaptation. An activity that , directly invites catastrophe would not be wilfully put in place, exceptby accident (Hewitt

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1983, 16-17). While planners may attribute a disaster to human omission, in other words, they cannot conceive of a disaster by human commission:To orchestrate devastation in a rational, materialist world is to be criminal or mad(Hewitt 1983, 17). Much as disaster planners today speak euphemistically ofnatural disasters,Japanese urban planners in 1923 reflexively attributed the Great Kanto Earthquake to a blamelessact of God. When Japanese urban planners confronted the bleak reality of the Great Kanto Earthquake, therefore, they mostly shook their heads. In their cultural construction of the catastrophe, the event was a tragic, unavoidable accident of nature that required no further explanation. Precisely because they subscribed to this benign interpretation of the Great Kanto Earthquake as anatural disaster,urban planners impoverished their own social science. Their predisposition to blame the disaster on what Hewitt terms impersonal, objectiveforcesallowed them to acknowledge the earthquake as a human tragedy, then to ignore the preexisting socio-economic geography of power that had helped make it one in the first place (Hewitt 1983, 27). Having thus given themselves a convenient excuse to ignore the possibility that past mistakes in planning might have caused the disaster, they freed themselves instead to pursue reconstruction with the abject functionalism that their training called for and their leaders dictated. Clamoring loudly for the reconstruction of Tokyo as a planned capital, and promoting this enterprise as the key to Japan continuing pursuit s of progress, urban planners reduced civilization to its least common denominator: material advancement. In 1923, flush with idealism for what the new capital promised to be, urban planners began to work up plans for Tokyo that illustrated the ideals they espoused. For a series of lectures introduced by Goto late that year, one of these planners, Ishizu Sanjir, worked in a sketch of modelavenue deployment and building heights-a model he recommended as a reference point for the planning of Japanese city streets (Ishizu 1923). Drawn from an influential urban manifesto by the French architect Eugene Hnard, whosecity of the futureplan plotted the systematic expansion of Paris through the creation of a network of roads dedicated to specified functions, Ishizu sketch similarly idealized the goal of metropolitan consolidation. s Equally impressed with Western models of urban transport efficiency was the reconstruction planner Tagawa Daikichir, who prefaced his remarks onthe Tokyo we should build (tsukuraru beki Tky) with an introduction to the imperial capital as aglobal cityand an appeal foridealismin its construction. His proposal forthe Tokyo we should build which , called for the creation of a new central railway station and an expansive commercial ward, placed the highest priority on efficient ground transportation (Tagawa 1923, iv and 1). Soon after the Bureau of Reconstruction was formed in 1923, its Planning Section submitted a research report onthe construction of contemporary citiesthat set forth with remarkable candor the premises and priorities of its urban planners.In order to minimize the damage of a

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future disaster, Tokyo and Yokohama must not neglect to establish uniform building codes and to improve city streets,wrote the Bureau.Only in this way will they be able to make the management of these cities, which have expanded with the economy, more rational and scientific (Teito Fukkin Keikaku-kyoku 1923, 1). Up to this point, the report clearly linked the Bureau road building agenda to urban safety. s But, in the survey that followed of contemporary city building in Europe and the United States, the Bureau urban planners tipped their hand. Noting ashamedly that Westerners had been heard to s remark sarcastically on the lack of paved roads in Japan, the authors again picked up their favorite theme of road building, but this time with a markedly different emphasis. Attributing the dearth of paved roads to theunchecked expansionof urban Japan, Tokyo`s erstwhile reconstructionists trumpeted the benefits ofurban planning :Through urban planning, cities can be transformedfromcities that developed naturallyintocities built by man (Teito Fukkin Keikaku-kyoku, 3-4, 7). In the end, the Bureau planners spoke with the hubris ofplanning engineers,pitting s humankind against nature as a civilizing force. Yet, Tokyo urban planners soon came under attack from within the capital and without for s their high flying, functionalist model-making. One of the first to raise the alarm was the cultural gadfly Gonda Yasunosuke. Barely two months after the earthquake, in the widely-read journal Ch kron, Gonda wryly noted that the massive project proposed forreconstruction of the [new] imperial capital(teito fukk) promised to achieve many things butrestoration of the [old] imperial capital(teito fukko) was not one of them (Gonda 1923, 276). Soon, when popular criticism of reconstruction intensified, Got and his phalanx of urban planners began to beat a strategic retreat from their grandiose pronouncements of 1923. In 1924, the respected civil engineer Ishihara Kenji gave every indication that their backpedaling had begun. His book on planning the contemporary city,which included a hortatory introduction by Got right-hand s man Sano Riki, concluded with a rhetorical plea for realism:Let us not lose sight of actuality, nor lose sight of our ideals, but master all reality(Ishihara 1924, 265). What Ishihara meant by master[ing] all realityis not at all clear, but it is clear that he and other planners had begun to master something else: the art of political doublespeak. In the years of reconstruction that followed, reality laid siege to the grandiose city vision promoted by Got and his urban planners. Placed in a defensive posture by popular resistance to many of their schemes, Tokyo planners laid bare the functionalist logic of their plans for s reconstruction. Increasingly, they focused their attention on the burnt-out downtown districts of the metropolis. Keen to revive the commercial and industrial economy of these districts, rather than to cultivate residential livability, the Bureau invested the lion share of its time and money on s the enhancement of intra- and inter-urban transport. Altogether, in the end, they plotted 52 new roads and 424 new bridges.

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That these new roads were the central features of the Bureau plans for Tokyo becomes s manifoldly clear when one examines the maps that it produced to celebrate the reconstruction enterprise (see Figures 2 and 3). The official volume commemorating Tokyo reconstruction, s published in 1933, presents two cartographic versions of the metropolis: before and after. In the first, which depictsTokyo Before the Earthquake,we see a welter of haphazardly laid out streets. In the second, which portrays theReconstruction Plan of Tokyo,this jumble has disappeared. In its place, we see only the efficient network ofmainandauxiliarystreets that the Bureau carefully planned. Significantly, in its historical assessment of the reconstruction effort, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government triumphantly celebrated the completion of this street network as a key development in the rise of Japanese capitalism.Reconstruction of the national capital after the Great Kanto Earthquake,they observed,offered a golden opportunity to remake Tokyo into a business center of a newly capitalist country(Tokyo Metropolitan Government 1994, 24). Given the attention paid to road building by the Bureau, it is hardly surprising that many other

Figure 2.Tokyo Before the Earthquake Source: The Reconstruction of Tokyo (1933)

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Figure 3.Reconstruction Plan of Tokyo Source: The Reconstruction of Tokyo (1933) worthy projects went by the board. It is instructive to consider just which projects these were. Perhaps the most disturbing deficiency in the Bureau plan was the lack of attention paid to s residential reform. Indeed, through a combination of myopia and miserliness, the Bureau actually exacerbated Tokyo residential problems. When landowners unexpectedly resisted its efforts to s widen streets by shrinking residential plots, the Bureau issued zoning variances calculated to win their cooperation. Specifically, in exchange for land to build roads, it agreed to allow landowners to construct cheap housing normally prohibited by the city building codes and to erecttemporary s

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housingon internal lots that had previously been zoned vacant. Although these zoning variances were introduced as emergency measures-and while landlords were put on notice that they would be expected to upgrade substandard housing and to remove temporary structures within five years-the city ultimately failed to enforce its own laws. Thus these substandardtemporary structures were rendered permanent by default, and reconstruction resulted paradoxically in a pattern of residential overcrowding that actually worsened housing conditions in Tokyo (Ishida 1995). Then there was the question ofland readjustment(kukaku seiri). Other than urban transport planning, this was the most sweeping urban initiative introduced by the Bureau and was ostensibly central to its metropolitan agenda. As characterized in the Urban Planning Law of 1919, land readjustment was conceived to promote the rational planning of undeveloped land on the outskirts of the city. Its explicit purpose was to accommodate urban demographic expansion by creating planned neighborhoods complete with roads, sewers, water lines, and other urban amenities. Significantly, however, the Bureau did not undertake land readjustment projects in the western districts that had attracted the lion share of displaced tenants from Tokyo burnt-out s s downtown; and those projects it did undertake in other parts of the city ultimately devolved into little more than road building schemes. While Tokyo reconstruction planners were wonderfully s long on the rhetoric of residential reform, then, they were woefully short on results. In the end, as central government bureaucrats, Tokyo reconstruction planners assimilated s their professional principles of scientific management to the interests of the nation-state. With respect to reconstruction, this meant re-creating Tokyo as the modern metropolis of the empire. Sitting near the top of Japan top-heavy urban planning administration, which dictated the s planning agendas of 37 cities by 1923, the Bureau did not propose merely to apply its capitalistic logic to the reconstruction of Tokyo but to extend it to urban Japan as a whole. Urban planners outside of Tokyo, particularly those employed by municipal governments, came to consider the urban planning establishment in Tokyo as an adversary. Galvanized by their mutual antipathy for the urban planning bureaucracy in Tokyo-and, more specifically, for the functionalist ideology that it often forced on urban planning in their respective cities-municipal urban planners openly rejected the most basic premise of reconstruction planning in the mid1920s. Rather than objectivizing their cities as abstract economic entities, in the way that Tokyo s planners had, they subjectivized their cities as social communities. While these reform-minded urban planners were welcome in cities such as Osaka, whose leadership openly resisted Tokyo centrism from the 1920s, their impact was negligible in the capital itself. What is more, given the obvious similarity between reconstruction planning in 1923 Tokyo and 1995 Kobe, it would seem as though the objectifiers continue to prevail today. In the hopes of reversing this trend, Miyamoto Ken has called for an urban revolution of ichi

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sorts. Sharply critical of the autocratic enterprise ofurban management(toshi keiei) that has guided reconstruction in Kobe-where planners have only reluctantly and ambivalently brought the city inhabitants into the decision making process-Miyamoto advocates the introduction of s democraticurban [public] policy(toshi seisaku) in its place. His hope is not merely to reverse the vectors of urban power, placing local people rather than central bureaucrats in the driver s seat, but to reinvent Japanese cities in the process (Miyamoto 1995, 86-96). While such a decentralization of urban authority would certainly create problems of its own, it would also afford Japan urban citizens an essential opportunity to place people first in the planning and s construction of their cities. In the wake of disaster, the citizens of Kobe have struggled valiantly to assert control over their destiny. One can only hope that their example will spawn support for the sort of urban populism that Miyamoto has envisioned. Let us hope that this revolution takes place beforethe big onestrikes.
References

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