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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 a“natural

disaster”-a sudden, shocking eruption of natural forces beyond human control. However

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’ichi and many others have observed,“The quake was a natural disaster. But

fires spread and rescue work was delayed owing to failures in both national and regional fire-

prevention 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 disaster”one critical step further (Miyamoto 1996, 8). For his part, Miyamoto has

reminded us that Japan’s postwar commitment to rapid urban industrial growth was frequently

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’s developmental priorities. Echoing Miyamoto’s assessment of the Kobe disaster as“a

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. But“housing 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 approached“reconstruction planning”(fukkô 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 of“housing

reconstruction”(jûtaku fukkô) and“social 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 Fukkô Kenkyû Purojiekuto 1998,

351). In its 1998 report on earthquake reconstruction in Kobe, the Ritsumeikan University

Earthquake Disaster Research Project confirmed the Hyogo Prefectural Governor’s disturbing

findings:“Today, three years after the earthquake disaster, by means of the nation’s technological

and financial power, the‘hard’elements 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’s reconstruction were little different

ideologically from those who engineered Tokyo’s reconstruction following the Great Kanto

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’s prewar great power

status, while those of 1995 treated it as a means of enhancing its postwar superpower status; the

critics of Tokyo’s road-centered reconstruction called for the creation of“livable cities”

(sumigokochi yoki toshi), while those of Kobe’s infrastructure-centered reconstruction

anticipated the advent of a“sustainable 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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政策科学７－３，Mar．2000

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 Observatory-

the 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’s population-and an

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 Ryôgoku. 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’s most

infamous urban fires (See Figure 1). Significantly, however, what the authorities chose to highlight

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Urban Planning as an Urban Problem: The Reconstruction of Tokyo after the Great Kanto Earthquake（Jeffrey E. Hanes）

was not the tragic loss of life but the massive“loss 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 (Kaizôsha 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 a“case of force majeure...beyond the control of human agency”-a

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Cities Year Butnt Area Loss of Wealth

(sq.m.) yen

London 1666 Sept. 2-6 1,768,603 107,300,000

Chicago 1871 Oct. 8-9 8,595,880 330,000,000

San Francisco 1906 April 18-21 12,165,344 750,000,000

Tokyo 1923 Sept. 1-3 33,477,836 5,506,386,034

Figure 1.“Burnt Areas of the World Great Fires”

Source: The Reconstruction of Tokyo (1933)

LONDON

SANFRANCISCO

CHICAGO

TOKYO

“terrible outburst of the forces which may at any time overwhelm a nation.”The state went on to

declare the Great Kanto Earthquake the“most horrible [disaster] ever know since authentic

history began,”ultimately pronouncing it a“great holocaust”that had“arrested 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 that“the 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, i-

ii).

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 of“agrarianists and moralists,”who cast the catastrophe as“a 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 in“land

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 Gotô Shimpei seized the

moment.

Gotô’s proposal prevailed for a number of reasons, including his ample political influence, but

most importantly because it resonated with the nation’s continuing commitment to rapid economic

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’s industrial production was concentrated in cities along this conurbation (Hanes 1993, 62),

and this simple fact impelled officials such as Gotô to re-conceive the imperial capital as a modern

industrial metropolis. As Gotô 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’s reconstruction with the hopes and dreams of Japan itself.

By September 12, 1923, the imperial government had made its position on reconstruction

crystal clear. As the“Imperial Edict on Reconstruction”proclaimed,“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 a“national capital”worthy of the distinction, not simply to

repair the“quondam metropolis,”loudly echoed Gotô’s original proposal. This proposal, in turn,

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, Gotô had sent Beard an urgent cable on September 7-some say, the first“official

news”of 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 Gotô, 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 Gotô

hoped to hear: that the foremost challenge of urban reconstruction was to make Tokyo more

efficient.

The position taken by Beard and Gotô on the reconstruction of Tokyo, which was the same

position subsequently adopted by the state in the emperor’s name, reveals how the planners of

reconstruction conceptualized national progress. As the Home Office’s careful justification of the

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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This extraordinary national[istic] narrative, which traces Japan’s rise as a“Power of the world”

to its commercial and industrial growth, then goes on to suggest that its“international position”

has been seriously compromised by the“devastation 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’s message, pure and simple. What is more, the

“metropolis”described 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 to“restore”previous“infrastructural

arrangements”but 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’s spatial economy.

From the outset, Gotô 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-Gotô 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, Gotô had unsuccessfully introduced a comprehensive

metropolitan plan whose 800 million yen price tag was so unbelievable that it won him the

nickname“Big Talker”(Koshizawa 1992, 8-11). Where this stillborn proposal left off, Gotô’s

reconstruction plan began.

The first sketch of Gotô’s reconstruction plan, presented to the Bureau soon after its

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), Gotô stressed its socio-

economic 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 for“New Tokyo”produced in 1921 by Fukuda Shigeyoshi, a city

engineer who subsequently rose high in the ranks of the Bureau, Gotô’s plan was a sophisticated

functionalist fantasy (Ishida 1992, 65-87). Equally fantastic was Gotô’s proposal to implement this

scheme. He initially proposed that the government buy up all the city’s land and, after instituting a

proper plan, that they simply sell the land back. (Nihon Toshi Keikaku Gakkai 1992, 156).

In 1923, when Gotô 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’s virtually unchecked metropolitan development. Although the

profession only began to grow following the enactment of the Urban Planning Law in 1919, Gotô

offered its practitioners what he presented as the“grand opportunity to build an imperial capital”

(Quoted in Koshizawa 1991, 38). To their credit, the Bureau’s urban planners rose to the occasion,

preparing maps, drawings, charts, surveys, statistics, manifestoes, and research monographs.

Translating their newly-acquired expertise into 468 million yen’s worth of urban projects, they

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’s reconstruction as a modern

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’s reconstruction was their dedication to scientific

management. Guided by the same“scientific, utilitarian”assumptions 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 a“giant catfish”(namazu) and too utilitarian to blame the fires that followed

on the fatalism of Tokyo’s inhabitants, who continued to (re)construct flimsy“fire traps”

(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, planners“cannot 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 from‘self-interest’, whose first

rule is‘survival’, or at least belongs to an underlying principle of adaptation. An activity that

directly invites catastrophe would not be wilfully put in place, except‘by 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 of“natural disasters,”Japanese urban planners in 1923 reflexively

attributed the Great Kanto Earthquake to a blameless“act 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 a“natural

disaster,”urban planners impoverished their own social science. Their predisposition to blame the

disaster on what Hewitt terms“‘impersonal, objective’forces”allowed 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’s continuing pursuit

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 Sanjirô, worked in a sketch of

“model”avenue 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 Hénard, whose“city of the future”plan plotted the systematic

expansion of Paris through the creation of a network of roads dedicated to specified functions,

Ishizu’s sketch similarly idealized the goal of metropolitan consolidation.

Equally impressed with Western models of urban transport efficiency was the reconstruction

planner Tagawa Daikichirô, who prefaced his remarks on“the Tokyo we should build”

(tsukuraru beki Tôkyô) with an introduction to the imperial capital as a“global city”and an

appeal for“idealism”in its construction. His proposal for“the 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 on“the construction of contemporary cities”that 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 Fukkôin Keikaku-kyoku 1923, 1).

Up to this point, the report clearly linked the Bureau’s road building agenda to urban safety.

But, in the survey that followed of contemporary city building in Europe and the United States, the

Bureau’s urban planners tipped their hand. Noting ashamedly that Westerners had been heard to

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 the“unchecked expansion”of urban Japan, Tokyo`s erstwhile reconstructionists

trumpeted the benefits of“urban planning”:“Through urban planning, cities can be transformed-

from‘cities that developed naturally’into‘cities built by man’”(Teito Fukkôin Keikaku-kyoku,

3-4, 7). In the end, the Bureau’s planners spoke with the hubris of“planning engineers,”pitting

humankind against nature as a civilizing force.

Yet, Tokyo’s urban planners soon came under attack from within the capital and without for

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

Chûô kôron, Gonda wryly noted that the massive project proposed for“reconstruction of the

[new] imperial capital”(teito fukkô) promised to achieve many things but“restoration of the [old]

imperial capital”(teito fukko) was not one of them (Gonda 1923, 276). Soon, when popular

criticism of reconstruction intensified, Gotô 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 Gotô’s right-hand

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 reality”is 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 Gotô and his urban planners. Placed in a defensive posture by popular resistance to

many of their schemes, Tokyo’s planners laid bare the functionalist logic of their plans for

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’s share of its time and money on

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’s plans for Tokyo becomes

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’s reconstruction,

published in 1933, presents two cartographic versions of the metropolis: before and after. In the

first, which depicts“Tokyo Before the Earthquake,”we see a welter of haphazardly laid out

streets. In the second, which portrays the“Reconstruction Plan of Tokyo,”this jumble has

disappeared. In its place, we see only the efficient network of“main”and“auxiliary”streets 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

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Figure 2.“Tokyo Before the Earthquake”


worthy projects went by the board. It is instructive to consider just which projects these were.

Perhaps the most disturbing deficiency in the Bureau’s plan was the lack of attention paid to

residential reform. Indeed, through a combination of myopia and miserliness, the Bureau actually

exacerbated Tokyo’s residential problems. When landowners unexpectedly resisted its efforts to

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’s building codes and to erect“temporary

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Figure 3.“Reconstruction Plan of Tokyo”


housing”on 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 substandard“temporary”

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 of“land 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’s share of displaced tenants from Tokyo’s burnt-out

downtown; and those projects it did undertake in other parts of the city ultimately devolved into

little more than road building schemes. While Tokyo’s reconstruction planners were wonderfully

long on the rhetoric of residential reform, then, they were woefully short on results.

In the end, as central government bureaucrats, Tokyo’s reconstruction planners assimilated

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’s top-heavy urban planning administration, which dictated the

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 mid-

1920s. 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’ichi has called for an urban revolution of

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sorts. Sharply critical of the autocratic enterprise of“urban management”(toshi keiei) that has

guided reconstruction in Kobe-where planners have only reluctantly and ambivalently brought the

city’s inhabitants into the decision making process-Miyamoto advocates the introduction of

democratic“urban [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’s urban citizens an essential opportunity to place people first in the planning and

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

before“the big one”strikes.

References

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