Distinctive patterns of industrial urbanisation in modern Tokyo, c. 1880–1930

Abstract: Industrial growth in Japan’s largest cities has followed patterns that are distinctive, and are significantly different from those that have been adduced in the recent literature on North America. This paper focuses on Tokyo, and in particular its north-eastern part, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that a process of ‘industrial urbanisation’ occurred in Japan’s capital city, a process that was shaped by the existence of a large proto-industrial base and sophisticated consumer economy and characterised by dynamic but disorderly growth in factories largely supplying consumer goods to the urban market. The paper reviews the disparate, not to say confused, nature of industrial growth in Tokyo, noting the variety in factory size and products as well as production methods. Central to the argument of this paper is that industrialisation preceded attempts at urban planning and that the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation occurred concurrently, laying the base thereby for the large mixed-function districts that became a common feature of Japanese cities.