Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xiii, 307 pp. (Maps.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-520-27520-1.
In Beyond the Metropolis, Louise Young strives to fill a gap in the scholarship on Japanese modernity, a story, she asserts, that historians have “overwhelmingly told … from the vantage point of Tokyo” (6). Locating her work “at the interstices of social and cultural history” (12), Young focuses her attention on “tracking the discourse on the modern” (7) in four prefectural capitals: Okayama, Niigata, Kanazawa, and Sapporo. She defines those cities in tightly circumscribed terms, viewing each first “as a constellation of institutions” and second “as a set of ideas—a social imaginary” (11). Her broader goal for the work, she states, is to “illuminate … the lived interdisciplinarity of social life” (12) as reflected in these modernizing processes. In a work teeming with urban portraits, sketches of individuals’ life courses, capsule discussions of knotty terms such as kokyō/furusato and ura Nihon, and broad treatments of the ongoing construction of railways, Meiji and Taisho economic evolutions, and twentieth-century inventions of tradition, however, images of lived reality in each of her cities gain and lose resolution page to page.
Young organizes her study in three parts. In the first, “Contexts,” she argues that the economic “boom” brought to Japan by the First World War “ushered in a new age of the city” (6) as wartime affluence “spurred municipalities to expand the range of urban amenities and develop basic infrastructure to accommodate the demands of a surging population and burgeoning local industry” (21). The war years promoted urban growth, but they also brought new social forces: the presence of the narikin, the newly rich who profited from wartime production (23–27), and the threat of the urban crowd that rose to prominence with the 1918 Rice Riots (27–32).
The second part, “Geo-power and Urban-centrism,” begins with an exploration of “a new cultural geography that … defined Japan in terms of Tokyo and its Others” (39). This emphasis on Tokyo, as elsewhere in the work, threatens to derail her central argument. Here, however, after demonstrating through the biographies of prominent intellectuals that “ascension to Tokyo” (jōkyō) for higher education not only “deprived provincial cities of local talent” but also prompted the students to adopt the capital as foundation for a new identity, she offers close readings to argue that “their provincial origins left conspicuous traces in their literary production,” resulting in figures who “located themselves as men of the metropolis, but also in relation to an earlier, provincial identity” (53). Young continues mediating the relationships between the metropolis and these provincial cities by careful analysis of local institutions, particularly schools and the press. While she concludes that “the newspaper provided a critical institutional foundation for local cultural movements” (69), she suggests also that the independence of local culture remained limited, as the local press largely “served as conduits for the import of new ideas and practices from abroad” (70), and an “assertive localism” expressed by provincial literary societies was in fact rooted in “movements that had been heavily influenced by Tokyo writers” (78).
This section’s second chapter reverses the center-Other equation, proposing that in “a time of transformation in the urban-rural relationship,” regional cities assumed a new centrality, “breaking down … old patterns of self-sufficiency and obstacles to demographic mobility … and replacing them with a new dependency on the urban market” (83). Young illustrates these trends through clearly formulated and detailed discussions of the economic and spatial development of her cities: the experience of Okayama, for example, demonstrates the destabilizing effects of railroads on existing patterns of commerce (92–95), while the suburbanization of Sapporo’s surrounding villages offered a “performative fix” against rigid rural–urban dichotomies (135).
The book’s final section, “Modern Times and the City Idea,” first relies on locally produced histories to establish how “urban elites,” perceiving “a crisis of socialization for municipal governments,” responded by “stretch[ing] the meaning of the city, installing [sic] the belief that the rising urban centers … represented natural communities that drew on a shared cultural heritage” (142). This line of argument takes Young to the edges of profound and highly contested dynamics in the historiography of twentieth-century Japan, including activities of local history movements (145–154), the roles of folklorists in reenvisioning the collective past (166, 171), and regionalism as itself an “invented tradition” (143) constructed “within a national frame” (144).
In the book’s final chapter, “The Cult of the New,” Young again leaves the local to focus on “broader intellectual trends that oriented people toward the future” (188). These cultural discourses transcended the local even as they attempted to control, reform, and contain it, and much of what Young cites are nationalist and centralist: “a new mania for government planning,” as well as “a boom in popular science and science fiction … in the service of nationalism,” and “a new faith in the efficacy of measurement and prediction, statistics, and prognostication … in the social sciences, management ideology, and government policy” (188).
Her late emphasis on centralizing discourses highlights two issues that run through the book as a whole. The first is a matter for social history: the definition of the actors who can be linked directly to the dynamics she cites. From the narikin (23) to the “urban crowd” (27), “urban elites” (142) to “prominent public intellectuals” (167), “city leaders” (142), an “urban-based middle class of professionals, technocrats, and managers” (189), and even “scholars and artists” (189), the identification shifts and wavers. The second is cultural, addressing the social imaginary of these times and places. The relentless pull toward the centre reflected throughout Young’s text serves as a constant reminder of the backdrop to all she dramatizes: the steady convergence of nationalist and militarist factions and eventual integration of all social institutions into the centralized state. From the viewpoint of the postwar era, Japan’s interwar modernity must be treated as complicit in those centralizing processes and, local boosters aside, one wonders how that centralization registered with local residents. That the topic is only briefly touched on in the epilogue to Young’s otherwise illuminating work represents a missed opportunity as we try to refine our view of Japan’s modernization.
Peter Siegenthaler
Texas State University, San Marcos, USA
pp. 439-441