Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo and the State

Tokyo is first and foremost capital of the Japanese state. Defeated in World War II, the state continued to lead the postwar society and economy through developmentalism, which advocated state-managed markets in the national interest and guided the economy through public policies and market incentives by coordinating capital, labor, and government. The stable political–bureaucratic elite ran the state and deterred interest groups from intervening in public policies. The developmental state emphasized the high-productivity growth industry sector, while depressing public consumption and investment in the urban centers. It engaged in managed globalization with national comparative advantage in mind.

Tokyo embodied the policies and practices of the developmental state. The centralized state policy-making process attracted the nation's major corporate head offices, financial institutions, and nongovernment organizations (such as labor and business federations) to Tokyo to be closer to the state. Higher education and public and private research institutes were concentrated in Tokyo to train the bureaucratic elite and serve the state. State planning and industrial policies contributed to the transformation of Tokyo's spatial structure and landscape. State-managed trade with the world made Tokyo the basing point for Japanese corporations' global operations. As a result, Tokyo's urban development was well supported by Japan's postwar developmentalism, which generated high economic growth, higher wages, a relatively egalitarian society, and stable national security.

But Japan's developmental regime has weakened considerably since the 1980s. The wildly speculative and inflated bubble economy in the 1980s, and the long deflationary period following its collapse in the 1990s, led to the crisis of devel-opmentalism and catalyzed Japan's transition toward a postdevelopmental regime. The ultimate cause of the regime shift, however, was domestic politics. Urban voters came to prefer consumption to production and began to see the developmental state as obsolete and unresponsive to their needs. They made a political choice for a consumption-based public policy over production and elected city administrations that would respond to their demand for increased public services and an improved quality of life. Public discontent with the developmental state grew as income inequality and unemployment rates rose in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was compounded by new concerns about the aging society and the environment. Out of touch, the political party (LDP), which had ruled Japan for more than half a century, lost its momentum and its majority in the early 1990s. The Japanese state is in the transition to a postdevelop-mental state. So is Tokyo.

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