Susan C. Townsend

The ‘miracle’ of car ownership in Japan's ‘Era of High Growth’, 1955--73

The ‘Era of High Growth’ in Japan is well known for its ‘miracle’ economy, although the reasons why car ownership increased during this period have been largely ignored. Both the ‘miracle’ and the process of motor manufacturing have been viewed from the perspective of supply rather than demand. This article examines the ways in which the formidable barriers to mass car ownership were removed during this period by analysing quantitative data and also reconsidering narratives of Japanese manufacturing predicated on Japanese cultural uniqueness (nihonjinron). It considers the Japanese as consumers as well as workers, and concludes that car ownership is less a ‘miracle’ than a manifestation of Japans process of modernisation during the twentieth century.

Miki Kiyoshi 1897-1945 : Japan's itinerant philosopher

This biography draws upon a range of autobiographical sources and new methods of narrative interpretation in order to discover what lies behind the ideas and motivations of Miki Kiyoshi, one of the best-known and most controversial Japanese philosphers of the 1920s and 30s.

The Great War and Urban Crisis: Conceptualizing the Industrial Metropolis in Japan and Britain in the 1910s

In Japan, the unedifying spectacle of the Great War broke the illusion of European superiority that had so impressed Meiji urban planners, and a new generation of urban visionaries turned to their own resources in order to find solutions to the problems posed by rapid urbanization. While the war itself had little direct impact on the Japanese City Planning and Urban Building Laws proclaimed in 1919, one of the reasons for creating it was the unplanned, sprawling nature of suburban development exacerbated by the economic boom of the war years. In the decade of the 1910s, the great industrial cities of England and Japan experienced an urban crisis which caused ideas about the links between town planning, housing and social reform to converge, but only temporarily. Howards tomorrow presented a new way of conceptualizing the industrial metropolis which attempted to balance town and country. Keywords: Great War; Japan; Meiji urban planners

Yanaihara Tadao and the British Empire as a Model for Colonial Reform

When the Japanese acquired their first formal colony, Taiwan, in 1895 (though they were no strangers to domestic colonization), it was only natural that they should turn to the examples of the European empires for guidance on colonial policy. The British Empire, with its highly flexible approach, was held up as a model of colonial rule by some Japanese colonial administrators and condemned by others. As Kibata Yoichi has pointed out, however, the Japanese were more keen to foster the image of British rule than to employ its techniques.1