VINAYAK BHARNE

University of Southern California

Manifesting DemocracyPublic Space and the Search forIdentity in Post-War Japan

The entry of Western democracy into Asia represents one of the most significant dimensions of theEast-West cultural dialectic. The transformative formal and intellectual influences of Westerndemocratic concepts on Asian urbanity and identity formation therefore remain paramount to thediscourse on Asian cities today. This document explores the search for democratic space inJapan—the first non-Western democracy in the world. By tracing the evolution and shifts ofJapanese public space over the last six decades, it attempts both a re-reading of the Japanese city asa democratic construct, and of democracy itself as a culturally appropriated model.

Democracy in Japan: An OverviewJapan’s defeat in World War II marked the end of aworld. Tokyo, though spared the atomic destructionof Hiroshima and Nagasaki, looked just asdevastated, a fourth of the city razed to the ground.With the hardships and ultimate futility of war, evenas the Japanese seemed ready for newer valueorientations under the foreign power, the AmericanOccupation (1945–1952) sought to insinuate notonly a democratic political system, but also ademocratic society and culture to support andmaintain it. The Emperor who had not so long agoembodied divinity was now reduced to a meresymbol; the armed forces were dismantled; theformer Meiji constitution was completely revisedand officially adopted in 1946; and the Diet was tobe the Japanese parallel of Western parliaments.The American Occupation ‘‘intentionally implantedand nurtured’’ the first industrialized democracy inthe non-Western world.1

The idea of democracy, despite sporadicmovements, had never been able to institutionalizeitself in pre-war Japan. During the Tokugawa regime(1603–1868) the shogun’s administrative methodshad suggested some early ‘‘democratic’’ tendencies:local feudal lords administered their own domainsjust as local leaders would villages. Thus, despite anundisputed central military government, theshogunate had effectively remained a decentralizedadministrative system with consensual dimensions.

However, the Meiji Restoration (1867–1868) thatswept away the shogunate had sought to create acentralized state with the emperor as the symbolicimpetus for citizen unity and modernization.Increasing political resistance prompted the draftingof a constitution in 1889 and the establishment of anational assembly—the Diet—elected by limitedsuffrage. But with the military and administrativebureaucracy remaining responsible to the emperor,not the Diet, it remained more nationalist thandemocratic in its goals.

With the death of Emperor Meiji and theaccession of the young and incapable EmperorTaisho in 1912, increasing urbanization and newforeign ideas had led political intellectuals such asYoshino Sakuzo to coin the term ‘‘minponshugi’’ toexpress a government ‘‘for the people’’ (but not yet‘‘by the people’’). But within a decade, increasingpolitical alienation had been further aggravated byJapan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. And by1937, with Japan’s invasion of China, the armywould completely take over the Japanese state,eradicating any democratic traces and ending in thedisastrous war with the allies. This was the historicbackdrop against which democracy would beofficially introduced in Japan, not as an indigenouscultural outcome, but as an American socio-politicalexperiment.

If Japan represents the six-decade-long legacyof this Western democratic implant, then the

Japanese city represents the setting for examiningits multifarious urban manifestations. The focus ofthis article is on examining public space,particularly in tracing the intellectual and formalsearch for expressions of democratic space betweenthe end of World War II and the beginning ofJapan’s 1980s economic bubble, and charting itsconcomitant or eventual shifts, contradictions, andtransformations by complex post-democraticentities. The intention is to expand the rhetoric ofa relatively understudied period of recent Japanesehistory and reflect more deeply on the forces andmeanings of public space as seen in the Japanesecity today. Underlying this analysis is theassumption that there is such a thing a‘‘democratic space,’’ a public sphere distinct fromthe state, for public debate, deliberation andconsensus. Tracing its evolutions and mutations canboth help reveal Japan’s cultural cleavages, andaffirm the reappraisal or negation of its democraticaspirations. The new forms of post-war public spacein Japan can therefore be seen as the contestedand negotiated terrain of socio-political renewaland cultural identity.

The idea of democracy carries manyconnotations. This article takes a broad and inclusiveview of the term. It requires the rights of citizens toparticipate in determining their form of governmentand its constituent parts. It requires a governmentthat is sensitive to citizen preferences, weighing all

Journal of Architectural Education, Manifesting Democracy 38pp. 38–50 ª 2010 ACSA

of them equally. It requires political institutions toprovide opportunities for citizen articulation andensure that policies are in some measure congruentwith these preferred expressions. While democracyin Japan over the last six decades accords closelywith all these basic elements—representation,participation, transparency, access, accountabilityand equality—in tracing the shifts in post-warJapanese public space, this article also intend toengage in a larger re-reading of the Japanese city asan East-West dialectic of democracy, and byextension a re-reading of democracy as a culturallyfiltered phenomenon.

Memorializing Democracy: Public Memoryas CatalystIn 1949, the site of the Hiroshima bombing wasmemorialized into a public space, the HiroshimaPeace Park (1949–1955). Designed by Japan’sconsummate modernist architect Kenzo Tange, itstriangular site was structured as a radial plancentered on a large trapezoidal green between theMemorial Museum to the south and the Cenotaphto the north (Figures 1 and 2).

The idea of a public park as a large social spacewas not new to Japan. Large semi-public gardensand parks typically associated with palaces, villasand temples have been an intrinsic part of Japan’straditional social patterns for centuries. Even asrecently as 1924, the Ueno Park had beenestablished in the city of Tokyo through an imperialland grant by Emperor Taisho�. But the Peace Parkwas a different paradigm in that it commemoratedfor the first time a narrative of public memorywherein the images and recollections of thousandsof ordinary citizens would be translated into a singlepublic setting of national importance. It was, in thissense, not only a spatial emblem of peace, but alsoof Japan’s new democracy.

Ironically, the park chose to prohibit publicgrieving for the effects of the bombing—amandate that would have significant socialconsequences. As historian John Dower noted:

‘‘Suffering was compounded not merely by theunprecedented scale of the catastrophe . . . butalso by the fact that public struggle with thistraumatic experience was not permitted . . . . Withbut rare exceptions, survivors of the bombs couldnot grieve publicly, could not share their

experiences through the written word, could notbe offered public counsel and support.’’2 Further,just as certain forms of public expression wereprohibited, others seemed encouraged—particularlythe discourse of peace, aimed among other thingstowards the strategic American interest of

1. Hiroshima Peace Park, Site Plan. (Source: Japan-ness in Architecture by Arata Isozaki, MIT Press, 2006.)

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portraying the bombing not as a catastrophe, butas a teleological end to the war.

The design of the Peace Park also sought aselective voice in the name of peace, bypassingthe struggle against certain injustices. Foremostamong these was the legacy of hibakusha or thebombing’s survivors of Korean descent who hadbeen present in Hiroshima only due to theirre-location as forced labor. Following the bombing,they had been given a marginalized status withinferior treatment for both physical andpsychological injuries. In 1985, the Peace Parkbecame the setting for an outraged hibakushagathering organized around a plan to renovate themuseum to register their continued plight. It was

only after considerable debate that the memorial’sgeneral narrative from bombing to peace wasretained, but significantly subdued byacknowledging the lingering mistreatment ofhibakusha of both Japanese and Korean descent.

As the inaugural spatial manifestation ofJapanese democracy, the Hiroshima Peace Park wasfraught with complexities. If it embodied patriotismand peace, it also represented the failure tounderstand the difficult ways in which a wrongedpopulace attempts to communicate its trauma andloss. While ‘‘peace’’ remained its dominant message,its suppressed and manipulated forms of publicnesswere evidence of an infant democracy’s poorcultural translation, and the conflict between a

universal need for critical memory and a lesssanitized display of history.

Formalizing Democracy: The Plaza asImportCirca 1950, post-war democracy had painted a newpicture in Japan. Overwhelming population increaseand unprecedented economic growth had led tomassive new public housing construction byagencies such as the Public Operated Housing(POH), and the Housing and Urban DevelopmentCorporation (HUDC). By 1958, the Nikken Sekkei’sTokyo Tower (1092 ft), emulating the Eiffel Tower,had broken the existing building height barrier often stories. It was amidst this boom of urbanizationthat the plaza as a symbol of Western democracybecame the crucial sub-theme of a cultural collision.

The idea of the plaza was poignant in theWestern architectural consciousness of the early1950s. As an aftermath to the war, the rhetoric onurban cores had shifted toward political events withthe plaza as the renewed setting for rallies anddemonstrations. The eighth gathering of theCongrès International d’Architecture Moderne(CIAM), themed ‘‘Heart of the City: Towards theHumanization of Urban Life,’’ called for strategieson post-war urban reconstruction.3 Japanesearchitects, now under the willful embrace ofWestern modernism, seemed charged like theirEuropean and American counterparts to recover therole of the plaza and its traditional urban functions.

Attempting to fill a void in the formerlynon-democratic Japanese architectural vocabulary,emerging architects such as Kenzo Tange begandeveloping new public space typologies. His designfor the town hall complex of his home town,Imabari, completed in 1959, included an auditorium,office center, and town hall compactly arrangedaround a public plaza. Tange’s interest in suchcommunal spaces dated back to his universitystudies of the Greek agora as a place where acitizen moved from the private realm to establishconnections with society.

2. Hiroshima Peace Park, Central Cenotaph with Memorial Museum in background. (Photograph courtesy of Tange Associates.)

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This idea of the Western plaza was an urbanistimport alien to Japan’s authentic traditions. Intraditional Japan, the labyrinthine tenuous street,not the square, had been the center of civic life. Ina stratified social structure with the emperor at itshead there was no communion in the democraticsense, and in historic Japanese capitals like Heijo-kyo (Nara) or Heian-kyo (Kyoto), no consciousexpression of any formal community space. The onlyprominent formal definition was the royal avenuebisecting the city and ending in the palace complex;the rest of the city was a grid of streets.4 Pre-warJapan had seen the making of major public spacessuch as the Hibiya Park in Tokyo (1903) that hadbeen the stage for mass protests against the treatyterms of the Russo-Japanese war, as well as thesetting for the funeral of former Prime MinisterOkuma Shikenobu. But the idea of the plaza as afigural public urban void had remained absent.Despite ‘‘Tsuji’’ (crossroads) used for postingtakafuda (placards for government notices), andkawara (riverbanks as a place of asylum for varioussocial outcasts) there was, as the research groupJapanese Urban Space concluded after an extensivestudy of fifteenth and sixteenth century cities, ‘‘noWestern style tradition of picturesque urban scenery. . . to be found in Japan; rather temporal or visualenclosures were set up here and there for rituals orfestivals.’’5 In the Western tradition, the plaza as thesetting for daily markets and religious rituals wasdeemed the city core. In ancient Japan, the yuniwafronting the Shi-Shinden (the main pavilion of theimperial palace) was where the gods were invitedand policy made and declared.

Recognizing the futility of seeking anythingresembling a Western plaza in their historic cities,Japanese modernists seemed all the morecompelled to create spatial parallels. The center ofthe 1970 Osaka Expo is a case in point. TheOmatsuri hiroba, literally ‘‘Festival Plaza,’’ an entitythat existed neither in Japan nor the West, wasplaced at the core of the 815 acres ‘‘Future City’’exhibit. The 350 · 1000 feet space was covered by

the world’s largest translucent roof of its time: agigantic space frame, 100 feet high, supported bysix pillars. Its centerpiece was The Tower of theSun by Japanese sculptor Taro Okamoto, a 230-foot-tall sculpture with exhibits themed aroundthe idea of evolution. If the Expo 70 ‘‘Future City’’represented Japan’s emerging modernist ambitions,its ‘‘Festival Plaza’’ as a new spatial type symbolizedits new desires of nationalism, democracy and hope25 years after the war (Figure 3).

While none of these were plazas in theauthentic sense of the term, the idea of the plazaas a large gathering space did see newer formswithin urban settings. In 1975, Kisho Kurokawadesigned the Head Offices of the Fukuoka Bankaround an immense ten-story high ‘‘engawa’’ asan ‘‘intermediate space for new kinds of urbanlife.’’6 This covered exterior zone with intermittentplanting beds, fountains, and sparse street

furniture, sought ‘‘to imbue the space with thecharacteristics of both interior and exterior.’’7 Itreflected Kurokawa’s search for an ‘‘architecture ofsymbiosis,’’ emphasizing his interest in the‘‘architecture of the street’’ since as early as1962, as ‘‘an alternative to the Western conceptof the plaza.’’8 Kurokawa was fascinated with howthe Japanese residential street or roji had servedthe same purpose as Western squares: how streetslined with homes, shops, and workshops werebeginning to function as multipurpose,semi-public space. Neither plaza nor street, theFukuoka Building was Kurokawa’s attempt atgenerating a new prototype for Japanese post-warurbanism.

Meanwhile, the Tsukuba Academic New Town,Japan’s first real post-war nationally sponsoredplanning effort, had been envisioned as a holisticcommunity around a central network of pedestrian

3. The ‘‘Festival Plaza’’ at the 1970 Osaka EXPO. (Source: Japan-ness in Architecture by Arata Isozaki, MIT Press, 2006.)

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decks and a large plaza. In 1983, following thefailure of its initial phase, when Arata Isozaki wascommissioned to design the Tsukuba plaza hub,he was keenly aware of the seeming quirk withinthis plan. To build an illusive city in Japan, a landwhere there had never been a plaza, seemed likea ‘‘double fiction.’’9 He chose to celebrate thisfictitiousness, consciously eschewing ‘‘any elementthat appeared to be of Japanese origin.’’10 Hetook nothing less than Michelangelo’sCampidoglio—the plaza in front of the RomanSenate, the image of which would later become asymbol of power for so many Western cities—andinverted it with ‘‘surroundings that appeared tocollapse like Guilio Romano’s work at Palazzo delTe at Mantua,’’ with further quotes fromBorromini and Ledoux.11 Even as this assemblageof a concert hall, information center, hotel andshopping mall around a sunken oval plazaprovoked international debate, Isozaki published

renderings of the project’s ‘‘ruins,’’ quoting the19th-century neo-classicist architect Sir JohnSoane’s rendition of the Bank of England. Fourdecades since its import, through this ‘‘apparitionof Japan-ness . . . a mere metaphor, that is tosay a rife fiction,’’ Isozaki chose to openlyproclaim his plaza as part of a manifestation ofevents and expressions that had always beendirected less towards Japan than to the worldoutside (Figure 4).12

The evolution of the Japanese plaza affirmedits perceptual shift from an optimistic democraticsymbol into a culturally residual simulacrum.Despite its random proliferation within theJapanese city, it remained alien, failing to rootitself in a culture that seemed perpetually reticenttowards it. As a metaphor of publicness, it wasnever able to become an intellectual referencepoint in Japanese urbanism. Rather, as early as the1960s, the train station would to take its place as

both urban center and the chosen setting fordemocratic theater, evinced in the notoriousShinjuku Station concerts.

Performing Democracy: Protest as IdentityThe performance of protest is not simply a mode ofpolitical expression, but also an indication ofdemocratic success. It gives new meanings topolitical processes while circumventing thelimitations of its institutions. Cultures of protestdevelop their own identities and influencesindependent of the state, providing important sitesfor contestation, re-definition and reconstruction.From the early 1960s, protest had saturated theJapanese political landscape. In 1959–1960,movement against the Japan-US Security Treaty(Anpo Toso) had claimed a life, sending shockwavesthroughout the nation, adding to the furor ofactivists seething with anti-government sentiment.In 1967, the protest at Haneda Airport withhelmeted armed students trying to prevent PrimeMinister Eisaku Sato’s visit to Japan’s Asianneighbors and the US had resulted in some sixhundred injuries. In 1968, the resident movement inSasebo had seen thousands gather in the small porttown to protest against the entry of a nuclearpowered aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise. Thesewere just some of the activist sites in a much widermilieu of political participation.

In the early months of 1969, 7000 anti-Vietnam War activists calling themselves the TokyoFolk Guerilla crowded the subterranean plaza andpassageways of Shinjuku Station to sing folk songsand listen to antiwar speeches. Beneath one ofTokyo’s burgeoning city centers and one of theworld’s biggest and busiest train stations, amovement of student sects and activists intersectedwith millions of commuters from all over Japan.Hardly marginal or illicit, this implicit activism,integral to the surfacing economic prosperity of1960s, touched the everyday life of all Japaneseand beckoned them to participate in, and bringmeaning to, their democratic ideals.

4. ‘‘Tsukuba Town Center in Ruins,’’ watercolor by Arata Isozaki showing sunken plaza in center. (Source: Japan-ness in Architecture by Arata Isozaki,

MIT Press, 2006.)

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While the Shinjuku concerts represented aprocess of democratic political renewal, and a searchfor an alternative base in the wake of theauthoritarian political institutions of wartime Japan,they also suggested a metaphorical twist. In theirattempt to bring ‘‘the people’’ of Japan intocontact with political activism, the activists hadsought to excavate new sites for populist politicalexpression. As if reinforcing the pretext used by thepolice to remove the Shinjuku demonstrations—thatin Japan there were ‘‘no plaza spaces wherepedestrians could legally foregather,’’—a trainstation, not a plaza or park, had become the newsetting for performing democracy.13

It is this contradiction that remained theintellectual subtext for the Tokyo MetropolitanGovernment Complex competition two decadeslater. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building(Tokyo� Tochosha), also referred to as Tokyo CityHall, would be located just five blocks west of theShinjuku Station, and house the headquarters of theTokyo Metropolitan Government, which governednot only the 23 wards, but also the cities, townsand villages that comprise Tokyo. It was a project ofimmense socio-political significance; its architecturehad to express the post-war institutionalization ofJapanese democracy.

Kenzo Tange’s winning entry accommodatedthe City Hall in twin high-rise office towers facingthe Shinjuku Central Park, with a vast crescentshaped ‘‘Citizen’s Plaza’’ fronting the lowerAssembly Building to its east. In what seemed like asummation of his five-decade search for democraticspace, his scheme was in every way European in itsformal conception, recalling the idea of a greatcathedral fronting a figural space. Conversely, ArataIsozaki’s entry had consciously refrained fromproposing anything even remotely resembling aWestern plaza. For him, the hi (protesting masses)of the 1960s Shinjuku events had changed in theiraffinities to public space by the 1990s. Heobserved: ‘‘to the extent that workable public spacecould no longer be attained in an outside space,

sheltered indoor spaces such as underground malls,atria, and internal circulation spaces have beencreated throughout the city’’. Hi fills up theseinteriors as an alternative to the plaza.14

His entry sought to create this‘‘internalization.’’ The entire complex was conceivedaround a vast axial covered space ‘‘doubling theinterior volume of the basilica of Saint Peter’s in theVatican.’’15 It was a linear sequence of mega-atriums with a four-to-one vertical proportion, thewalls of which began at the base with a massivearcade, shooting up into a glass and steel latticeadorned with super-sized banners, and connectedfrom one side to the other through a series ofmulti-level spaces. The rendering seemed more likea vintage magnum opus set, with ceremonial stairs,an obelisk, and people within a colossal setting toolarge for human intimacy (Figure 5). But Isozaki’sentry, however radical, can be read as an attempttowards a ‘‘Japanization’’ of democratic publicspace. In his diagnosis of the plaza’s abandonmentand the citizens’ affinity to urban crevices was aneffort towards re-assessing the Japanese democratictendency and projecting the values underpinningtheir evolving post-war identity.

Today, Tange’s twin 48-story towers arereferred to by many as the ‘‘Gothic Cathedral’’ ofJapan, while his ‘‘Citizen’s Plaza’’ boasts a history ofnothing but emptiness, neither embodying his older‘‘Heart of the City’’ argument, nor a fraction of thehi that had filled the West Plaza of Shinjuku Stationtwo decades earlier. It remains, however welldetailed, a sheer urban void, affirming the 1990swithering of Japanese democratic performances,overtaken by a disastrous bubble economy thatseemed ‘‘naturally enough, empty of all culturalcontent.’’16 Tokyo’s City Hall then manifestsdifferent things depending on who is looking:political evasion, overindulgence, escapism, orconversely a static counter-image of corporatetotalitarianism that absorbs the myriad politicalperspectives of Japan’s ephemeral democraticwhims (Figures 6 and 7).

Contradicting Democracy: Mickey MouseMeets GodzillaIf publicness is a barometer of democracy, then thetheme park represents the nemesis of the Japaneseplaza. If the image of the empty plaza suggeststhe Japanese reluctance toward gathering in theWestern sense, then the theme park, in every way,contradicts it. During Japan’s post-war economicmiracle, Tokyo’s rapid population influx andunprecedented land prices had caused many tosettle on the city’s outskirts. One response to thislooming threat of uncontrolled urban sprawl andinsufficient infrastructure was the new town ofTama incepted in 1965 to provide housing within aplanned urban environment.17 Six years after theMeiji-mura Museum in Aichi prefecture hadpioneered the idea of the theme park in Japan in1965, Tama opened its first phase with neithersquare nor park, but a large covered entertainmentpark called Sanrio Puroland as its urban heart.

While Tama was the first truly urbanmanifestation of the theme park, its establishmentas a prototype of Japanese publicness must beindubitably attributed to Tokyo Disneyland. Theopening of Tokyo Disneyland in the city of Urayasuin the Chiba prefecture bordering Tokyo in April1983 led to a proliferation of theme parksthroughout the country. They were sustained amongother things by the enactment of the ‘‘Resort Law’’that encouraged the construction of resort facilitiesto increase disposable income, provide jobopportunities, and boost local economies during thebubble years. Today there are over 230 amusementparks in Japan.

Tokyo’s 115-acre Disneyland is a Godzillacompared to its California original—some 20 acresbigger. Its seven sections—World Bazaar,Adventureland, Westernland, Critter Country,Fantasyland, Toontown, and Tomorrowland—despite fewer attractions lure over 100 millionvisitors each year. Its newer partner, Tokyo DisneySea, which opened in September 2001, has also

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seven sections—Mediterranean Harbor, AmericanWaterfront, Mysterious Land, Mermaid Lagoon,Arabian Coast, Long River Delta, and PortDiscovery—but these are geared more for romanticand gourmet pleasures. Ikspiari is a four level largeshopping mall resembling California and Florida’sDowntown Disney shopping, dining, andentertainment area. It includes brand names such asPaul Smith, Rope, Gap, Diesel, Benetton andTiffany, and gourmets from Godiva, Sembikiya,Pierre Herm, Trattoria Sabatini, Segafredo andPlanet Hollywood.

Interestingly, Tokyo Disneyland is not anunapologetic replica of its American original. Whilethe overall park layout mirrors its Americancounterpart—from entry to Main Street to thecentral Cinderella Castle roundabout branching intothe various ‘‘worlds’’—there are differencesbetween the two. Main Street, called ‘‘WorldBazaar,’’ is covered by a Plexiglas canopy, as isFrontierland, here called Westernland. There is noNew Orleans Square and the steam train thatcircumambulates the Los Angeles park runs aroundAdventureland. But more visibly, most rides arenarrated in Japanese, all signs and restaurant menusare printed in Japanese (with English translation insmall print), and almost all of the employees andguests are natives.

From the standpoint of Japanese democraticspace, the success of the theme park affirms that bythe late 1970s the placelessness of the modernJapanese city had become the provocative,intellectual context for newer dialogues anddirections. Disneyland had, in fact created a newparadigm of mass gathering that had traditionallyoccurred only during festivals. With emergingarchitects such as Toyo Ito arguing in his essay‘‘Collage and Superficiality in Architecture’’ for anew cultural notion of introverted, closed domainsto counteract the disorder of Japan’s ‘‘Non-PlaceUrban Realm,’’ the theme park was seen as anantidote to Japan’s impoverished public realm,affirming a perception of the Japanese city more

5. Interior perspective of Tokyo Metropolitan Building—un-built

competition entry by Arata Isozaki. (Source: Japan-ness in Architecture

by Arata Isozaki, MIT Press, 2006.)

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6. Site Plan of Kenzo Tange’s winning entry for the Tokyo

Metropolitan Building with its crescent shaped ‘‘Citizen’s

Plaza.’’ (Photo Courtesy of Tange Associates.)

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‘‘out of a nostalgia for (a) lost architectural pastwhich indiscriminately mixed with the superficialicons of the present.’’18 Ironically, the motivesunderlying the creation of such privatized ‘‘publicrealms’’ were not concerns for public welfare, orsocial reform, but simply those of economicdevelopment through the corporate projection of apositive self-image of good citizenry.19 The successof the theme park in Japan was a directcontradiction of its democratic spatial expressions,offering the same simulated pseudo publicness thatin the United States had become an increasinglycritical target for its apparent irony of ‘‘pay(ing) forthe public life.’’20

Overwhelming Democracy: The Spectacleof ConsumerismThe idea of a public domain free for populistexpression can unleash the uncanny nature of anation’s imagination. It can instigate an evolvingculture’s disparate voices beyond its politicalinstitutions or timeless traditions. Mass media,among other things, can become a way of makingpublicness vibrant in the face of its institutionalirrelevance. The psychedelic spectacles of the bynow notorious Japanese streets of Ginza, Shinjukuand Akihabara appear to embody this truism. By the1970s, with their rhetoric of neon and electro-signage beginning to mark the re-emergence ofpreviously unseen forms of publicness, it seemed asif consumerism, not democracy, was the dominantforce of public life.

Ginza’s evolution from the traditional woodenroji (street) to the glitzy neon district representsone of the most dramatic transformations in post-war Japanese urbanism. It was here that Japanhad seen its first Western street design in 1872.Under the Meiji government, the British architectThomas Walters had redesigned the street as awestern anomaly, with brick buildings and widetree-lined boulevards, more pleasant to look atthan to inhabit in the hot humid climate. But thatfigment of the British suburb was leveled in the7. Model of Kenzo Tange’s winning entry for the Tokyo Metropolitan Building. (Photo courtesy of Lester Ho.)

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Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and rebuilt as ashopping and entertainment district. Aftersurviving World War II it remained a commercialcenter, transforming into one of the mostexpensive areas of real estate in the world during

the bubble economy of the 1980s. The characterof the Ginza today is similar to midtownManhattan in its cavernous street proportions, itsmajor thoroughfares Sotobori-dori, Chuo-dori,Showa-dori and Harumi-dori and their designer

brands—Louis Vuitton, Burberry, SalvatoreFerragamo, Apple—embodying the new paradigmof post-industrial Japanese street life.

Shinjuku, hardly touched by the 1923 GreatKanto Earthquake, became an attractive businesses

8. Shinjuku nightscape. (Photo courtesy of Brad White.)

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hub after the widespread destruction. Circa 1971,the Keio Plaza Hotel marked the opening of Japan’sfirst skyscraper. And one of the squares, wheredissident hippie gangs had lived during the 1960sShinjuku riots, became the site of an immense newdepartment store called Studio Alta. It displayed acolossal video screen incessantly spewing outcascades of images, setting dramatic precedents forthings to come. Today, surrounding the station,there is a bustling shopping district known for,among other things, its nightlife, especially inKabuki-cho, one of Japan’s most famous (andnaughtiest) amusement centers.

Shinjuku’s notorious psychedelic nightscaperepresents the ultimate neo-expressionism ofJapanese street life. It appears more like a high-tech reincarnation of decadent, frivolous Edo periodukiyo (‘‘Floating World’’) themes embodied throughLas Vegas-like simulacra, fluorescent screens, andbuilding skins that are recurrently shed andcontinually updated to keep up with the post-industrial whims of Japanese consumerism.21 Andtrue to Toyo Ito’s observation, ‘‘If the Western city isa museum, then the Japanese city is a theater,’’ itseems that it is not just signage but the buildingsthemselves that are designed not with theexpectation of standing the test of time, but ratherto be torn down sooner rather than later andreplaced by a new backdrop appropriate to theeconomic and technological signs of the times(Figure 8).22

What meanings underlie this spectacle of massmedia and communication? If the Western plazaembodies Jurgen Habermas’s advocacy for a‘‘deliberative democracy,’’ does the semioticJapanese street represent Chantal Mouffe’salternative of ‘‘agonistic democracy?’’23 The formeris grounded in the idea of the ‘‘public sphere’’ as anessential arena for populist deliberation andconsensus toward the making of sound policy.Conversely, the latter believes that democracyshould be designed to optimize the expression ofpopulist disagreement. In seeking to place

opponents in adversarial rather than antagonisticroles it makes democracy a process of contestationand public space the material artifact ‘‘of anevolving and messy ….. process.’’24

Or does Shinjuku manifest, instead, theoverwhelming of the Japanese ‘‘democratic’’ publicrealm by the spectale of Japanese consumerism?For Shinjuku exaggerates the idea of street signageinto a socio-political art. It inverts the realistviewpoint of signage reflecting society; instead,society is the mirror for the sign. It is a pretext forturning urban life into a consumerist gallery, forerasing histories, inequalities and conflicts, anddiverting attention from the ideologicallyconstructed political world, urging citizens towardbemusement and obliviousness. Within this

inversion is Japan’s ultimate indigenous nod towardthe artistic tradition of reimagining the mundaneand an affirmation that it is not democracy, butrather post-Westernization and globalization withinwhich are nested other desires and expectations.

Post-Democracy: The Paradox of JapanesePublicnessIf democracy was a Western impregnation thatskewed Japan’s cultural identity, then why cannotnative and Western patterns coexist within itscontemporary essentialized consciousness? If theannual Daidogei World Cup Street PerformanceCompetition in Shizuoka—with its internationalmenagerie of pantomimes, magicians, musicians,and artists competing for a jackpot—suggests

9. Geon Matsuri festival in Kyoto. (Photo courtesy of Asano Noboru.)

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Japan’s globalizing dimensions, then conversely it isduring festivals—which continue to form an integralpart of its urbanity—that Japan’s forms of pre-democratic publicness come truly alive. On July 17of each year, during Gion Matsuri, 32 tall woodenfloats, each belonging to a different neighborhood,are paraded through downtown Kyoto, pulled byhundreds of white-clad locals.25 Numerous suchlocal festivals—Kanda Matsuri in Tokyo, TakayamaMatsuri in Takayama, Nebuta Matsuri in Aomoricity—affirm their continuing rigor in thecontemporary Japanese consciousness. Thejuxtaposition of these ancient, symbolically chargedconstructs moving through the wide, asphalted,sealed-off thoroughfares, against the backdrop ofhigh-tech consumer-oriented stores may look out ofplace, yet the age-old expression of the festival as a‘‘moving museum’’ persists (Figure 9).

But while such paradoxes of publicness mightsuggest Japan’s mediation of post-democratizationwith its traditional community ideas, it is today alsothe backdrop for newer meanings of democracy andtheir expressions in public space emerging amongother things from Japan’s post-bubble economicdownturn. Foremost among these is the issue ofhomelessness, whose socio-political implications canhardly be evaded. In Tokyo alone, some 2,600people are now officially listed as homeless(although charities claim the number to be two tothree times that figure). Following the economiccrisis of the late 90s, public parks have now becomeplaces of refuge and blue tents the symbols ofJapan’s homeless. Such conditions, barely on theradar a decade ago suggest the pressing need toreassess the confluence of Japanese democracy andpublic space, and once again examine paradigms ofpublicness that may question the very foundationsof its predecessors.

Epilogue: Democracy and The JapaneseCityBy focusing on the nexus of democracy and itspublic space manifestations, this study

endeavored to re-read the evolving identity ofthe Japanese city amidst its ever-changingpresent and recent past. This identity remainsboth elusive and complex. It is neither whollyJapanese, nor wholly Western. Rather, Japan is a‘‘culture of imports’’ tracing back to its ancientChinese influences.26 Democracy is part of thislong tradition. Japan’s diffusion ofdemocratization and Westernization as mutuallyinseparable constructs represents a cultural‘‘problematic,’’ the character of which, from itsbeginning, ‘‘has belonged to an external gaze.’’27

The contemporary Japanese city must beunderstood, therefore, as a sixty-year-longstruggle to shape a nation’s democratic identitywithin the confines of an imposed andirrevocable East-West dialectic.

Yet sixty years since its implantation, theideals of democracy have been embraced soenthusiastically in Japan that the word‘‘democracy’’ has the ability to represent one of thegreatest accomplishments of post-war Japanesesociety. The idea of people as participants, notsubjects, in political life represents a dramatictransformation within a not-so-long-ago imperialsociety. While certain social dimensions such aswomen’s rights movements may not have seendramatic advances in a society still tending towardmale supremacy, the assimilation of an egalitariandemocracy in Japan’s remarkably homogenousand religiously tolerant society has generatedrelatively few minority challenges. While a broaderassessment of Japan’s democratic success isbeyond the scope of this exploration, it is safe tosay that Japanese democracy compares favorablywith other industrialized societies of Europe andAmerica.

Viewing democracy through the lens of thetransformation of the Japanese city affirms itsinclusiveness and cultural pluralism. If democracy isbut a legal text denoting its country of affiliation,then this indeed is its greatest strength. For all itspolitical success or failure, democracy is manifested

only through cultural appropriation. At the PeacePark it struggles to understand its populistdimensions. At Shinjuku, it plumbs the depths ofJapanese society to shape the fabric of its nascentpolitical ideals. At Tsukuba, it morphs into an urbansatire on Japan’s willful Westernization. And inShinjuku’s streets, it is overwhelmed by the forcesof Japanese consumerism. These shiftingmanifestations of post-war public space in Japandeepen the idea of democracy in demandingreadings and re-definitions beyond its originalWestern sources.

Viewing the Japanese city through ademocratic lens in turn beckons a re-reading of theidea of the ‘‘democratic city’’ that in many waysseems contradictory to its Western sources. Whetheras a futuristic embodiment or an apocalyptic versionof the modern metropolis, Tokyo today epitomizesJapan’s post-industrial urban identity. It is acomplex, spasmodic, polycentric system that isanything but an ‘‘Urbs Aeterna, centered on thecivic square with splendid and hardly changingpublic institutions.’’28 On the contrary, it is ahaphazard and flexible ‘‘City Vital’’ with easy accessto entertainment and information, and perpetuallypulsating amoebic spasms of interchangeability.29

In almost every sense, it demonstrates a clearcontradiction to everything held conventionally‘‘urban’’ and western. And yet, Tokyounapologetically embosses its democratizationthrough what Roland Barthès observes as the‘‘precious paradox’’ of its empty center.30 The EdoCastle, Tokyo’s former imperial epicenter, liesshrouded in foliage, inhabited by an emperor who isnever seen, embodying ‘‘the visible form ofinvisibility, hid(ing) the sacred ‘nothing’.’’31 Ifdemocracy was a Western socio-political genomeinfused into the sinews of a prostrate nation, thenmanifesting democracy was its predefined pathtoward modernity and beyond, and toward itscurrent unequivocal trends of globalization thatincreasingly characterize its seemingly stateless andborderless urban condition.

49 BHARNE

AcknowledgmentsI thank Marco Cenzatti (University of CaliforniaBerkeley) and George Dodds (University ofTennessee) for their editorial advice towards thefinal development of this article.

Notes

1. Takeshi Ishida and Ellis S. Krauss, Democracy in Japan (University of

Pittsburgh Press, 1989), p. 3.

2. John W. Dower, ‘‘The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in

Japanese Memory,’’ in Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History

and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.

116–42.

3. The Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) (or

International Congress of Modern Architecture), founded in 1928 and

disbanded in 1959, was a series of international conferences of modern

architects. The organization was hugely influential not only in

formalizing the architectural principles of the modern movement, but

also in projecting architecture as an economic and political tool that

could be used to improve the world through the design of buildings and

through urban planning. In 1951, CIAM VIII was held in Hoddesdon,

England, with the theme ‘‘The Heart of the City.’’

4. The Heian Capital (Kyoto) resembled that of its predecessor Heijo

(Nara) in its basic grid layout, but was completely regular in plan. The

blocks too were a uniform 120 meters on a side and were not affected

by varying street widths as they had been at Heijo, where it was the

distance from street centerlines that remained a constant 120 m. The

Heijo Capital was built at the height of a period of international

commerce and exchange throughout Asia that centered on the Tang

Court and the Silk Road. It was amidst these exchanges that Heijo was

designed as a copy on a smaller scale of the Tang dynasty capital of

Changan. Heian was planned on an even larger scale than Heijo, and

since its founding in 794 continued to be for most of Japan’s history the

center not only of government but of learning and the arts, and all other

parts of the country bowed to its cultural ascendancy. It thus serves as

one of the best precedents to understand traditional Japanese

urbanism.

5. Arata Isozaki, ‘‘Ka (Hypothesis) and Hi (Spirit)’’ in Japan-ness in

Architecture (MIT Press, 2006).

6. Ibid, pp. 100–01.

7. Ibid, pp. 19–22.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., pp. 65–66.

10. Ibid, p. 75.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid, p. 76.

13. Ibid, p. 73.

14. Ibid, p. 80.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. The planning and development was carried out jointly by the

Housing and Urban Development Corporation, Tokyo Metropolitan

Housing Supply Corporation and Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

18. Toyo Ito, ‘‘Collage and Superficiality in Architecture,’’ in Kenneth

Frampton, ed., A New Wave of Japanese Architecture (New York: IAUS,

1978).

19. Tokyo Disneyland for instance was owned and operated by the

Oriental Land Company (OLC), a post-World War II corporate

conglomerate whose initial goal had simply been the reclamation of the

shallow areas of Tokyo Bay as valuable real estate investment. A

subsequent government policy mandating exclusively ‘‘leisure’’ purposes

had compelled the OLC to send study teams around the world to

determine the best solution, and one team had returned from Anaheim,

California with the idea of Disneyland. Negotiations with the Walt

Disney Company in the mid 60s just prior to Walt Disney’s death and

during the development of the Orlando, Florida park, had been

unsuccessful, but the OLC would returned again in the late 70s agreeing

to a handsome licensing contract, with Tokyo Disneyland eventually

opening on April 15, 1983.

20. Charles Moore, ‘‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life,’’ Perspecta,

no. 9–10 (1965): 57–97.

21. Ukiyo or ‘‘The Floating World’’ is a term used to describe—but

not limited to—the pleasure-seeking lifestyle and culture of Edo

Period Japan (1600–1867). Though its epicenter was Yoshiwara, the

culture of this licensed red-light district, with brothels, teahouses and

kabuki theaters frequented by Japan’s growing middle class, also arose

in other cities such as Osaka and Kyoto. The famous Japanese

woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e, or ‘‘pictures of the Floating

World,’’ depict scenes of geisha, kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, and

samurai.

22. Toyo Ito, ‘‘Collage and Superficiality in Architecture.’’

23. The term ‘‘deliberative democracy’’ was originally coined by Joseph

M. Bessette in ‘‘Deliberative Democracy: The Majority Principle in

Republican Government’’ in 1980, and he subsequently elaborated and

defended the notion in The Mild Voice of Reason (1994). Jürgen

Habermas remains one of the most prolific advocates of this theory. For

more see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public

Sphere, 1962. For more on Mouffe’s concept, see Chantal Mouffe,

Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism (Vienna: Institute for

Advanced Studies, 2000).

24. Mouffe, Deliberative Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism.

25. Gion Matsuri is one of the largest festivals in Japan. The origins of

the festival can be traced back more than 1,100 years, to a procession

led by a Shinto priest in 869 AD to try and appease the gods and halt

an outbreak of the plague that was devastating the city. The plague

stopped soon after, but the procession remained a popular event and

was repeated year after year. In 970 AD it was institutionalized and

became an official festival of the city. It is held from the 1st to the 31st

of July and consists of various major and minor events. However, the

highlight of the celebration takes place on the 17th, with 32 colorful

floats (Yamaboko in Japanese) forming a long procession pulled through

the main streets of the city.

26. For example, Japan ‘‘imported’’ many of its cultural ideals in

religion, art, and architecture from China, and then ‘‘refined’’ them

through its own context to create a unique and specific cultural identity.

So also, in a more modern context, Japan ‘‘imported’’ the automobile

and electronic industry ideas from the West and revolutionized them in

its own right.

27. Arata Isozaki, ‘‘Japanese Taste and its Recent Historical

Construction,’’ in Japan-ness in Architecture.

28. See Gunther Nitschke, ‘‘Transience and Renewal in Japanese Form’’,

Kyoto Journal 50: Transience—Perspectives on Asia, June 2002.

29. Ibid.

30. Roland Barthès, ‘‘City Center, Empty Center’’ in Empire of Signs

(Toronto: McGraw Hill-Ryerson, 1982), pp. 30–32.

31. Ibid, pp. 30–32.

Manifesting Democracy 50