Klemen SENICA
A city at a turning point
Title: Creativity in Tokyo: Revitalizing a mature city
Authors: Matjaž Uršic and Heide Imai
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Place and year of publication: Singapore, 2020
Number of pages: 248
DOI: 10.1007/978-981-15-6687-5
Tokyo is a megacity that, in the seem­ingly distant pre-Covid-19 era, was globally considered a metropolis of haute cuisine, as well as a global hub in many other respects, thus attracting people from around Japan and the globe for shorter or longer stays. As a result, Tokyo is also a megacity that, due to ongoing development, is changing so rapidly that its transformation often surprises even the locals if or when they manage to get off the beaten track of their everyday lives. In their book Cre­ativity in Tokyo: Revitalizing a mature city, the spatial sociologist Matjaž Uršic and the cultural studies scholar Heide Imai discuss how Tokyo residents (crea­tively) respond to the rapid changes and the fact that, in the race to become a major global financial center, the city is being flooded by non-places.
In the spirit of modern scholarly vol­umes, each of the book’s nine chapters can be read as an independent and complete whole, as implied by the de­cision to provide references at the end of each chapter. Chapter one presents the theoretical and methodological re­search premises, the authors articulating their substantial analytical challenge as follows: “We attempt to connect both bottom-up (local community) and top-down (creative class) approaches for a more holistic, albeit still limited, in­sight into how creativity is formed in Tokyo” (p. 7). In studying creativity, they do not focus on “the output, or the creative product, but rather on the process that either ignites or obstructs urban creativity” (p. 6). They combine this analytical approach with the eth­nographic method of participant obser­vation, semi-structured interviews, and narratives, providing fresh insight into Tokyo’s recent urban development.
Chapter two first highlights the press­ing social issues of contemporary Japan, a country that continues to stagnate economically after the burst of the real estate and stock market bubbles in the early 1990s. As a result, both the coun­try and the city are dealing with a de­cline in birth rates, population ageing, a labour force shortage, and other issues. In this respect, the authors point out that Tokyo’s creative ecosystems cannot be entirely explained with international hub theories as these ecosystems are de­fined by specific local features. One such special feature is that, despite consider­able investment in the development of innovative technologies, Japan has found itself struggling to sell its prod­ucts in the global market despite their quality.
In chapter three, Uršic and Imai discuss the relocation of the inner Tsukiji Fish Market, a once popular tourist site and a cultural institution that “symbolical­ly, historically, and socially represented one of the most important local con­sumption spaces in the city” (p. 62). However, because Tokyo’s Ginza dis­trict, where this market was located, is subject to substantial transformation (i.e., gentrification), the central and best-known part of the market was re­located to Toyosu Island in Tokyo Bay, not without opposition from the locals.
Chapter four raises the issue of precar­ious work, although without a broader critical examination of the neoliberal economic model, which has predom­inated in Japan since 2000 and is the legacy of the extensive structural re­forms of Junichiro Koizumi’s govern­ments and his political-economic phi­losophy of “no pain, no gain”, which still deprives many young creatives of social and economic security and sub­sequently forces them into insecure forms of employment. Nonetheless, the authors argue that the official discourse that advocates the need for employment flexibility of creatives today actually “mystifies the upsides of flexibilization, while neglecting or ignoring the collat­eral damage found in the precarization of the working and living conditions of small creative actors” (p. 91). Even though, in the big picture, the Japanese economy seems to be largely composed of multinational corporations, its actu­al structure is different. In addition to external factors, the rapid economic de­velopment and expansion into foreign markets, especially in the automobile and electrical engineering industries in the second half of the twentieth cen­tury, were also or primarily facilitated by small and medium-sized enterprises. Over the past two decades, these have been much more exposed to the “invis­ible hand of the market” than before.
In chapters five to eight, the authors focus on the Tokyo neighbourhoods (e.g., Ichigaya, Okachimachi, Koenji, etc.) where they have conducted their field research during the past decade. The districts of Hikifune and Kyojima are particularly interesting, having un­dergone many changes in recent years, whereas some of their parts still preserve the spirit of times past, specifically the Showa period (1926–1989). Kyojima is one of the few areas in Tokyo that was not destroyed by the heavy American air raids at the end of the Second World War. Hence its many wooden buildings now cause headaches for the munic­ipal and local administrations in this highly earthquake-prone city. Between 2008 and 2018, many young artists and entrepreneurs were drawn to this area, where they started renovating and transforming the old buildings for their creative purposes. Through interviews, the authors succeed in portraying the vibrant life of the area, to which a wide variety of creatives in the broadest sense of the word have moved from around and beyond Japan to pursue their crea­tive ambitions. One of them is a Norwe­gian woman named Britt, who, together with Yamato-san, designs unisex denim yukata. According to the interviewees, their business is thriving.
The above raises the question of wheth­er the Tokyo-based examples of good practice presented by the authors (e.g., p. 126) can also be applied to Slovenia. Instead of having the centres of even the largest Slovenian cities greeting visitors with vacant display windows covered in tattered “for rent” notices, surely the local political elites could seek to revive vacant spaces by offering them to creatives, artists, young entrepreneurs, and the like, charging only token rents. These would not only lend a new (artis­tic) character to the city centres, a move at least some of the locals would wel­come with great enthusiasm, but also gradually begin attracting visitors and tourists from near and far, with posi­tive implications for both the local and national economies. As highlighted by the authors, such regeneration of dere­lict urban areas usually also stimulates large chain stores – which in Slovenia tend to be concentrated in large malls on the urban outskirts – as well as oth­ers to return to urban centres. Although Slovenia certainly has the knowledge, skills, and creative ideas to achieve this, the parochialism of urban policymak­ers that gravitate toward flashy but ephemeral urban regeneration solutions seems to be an insurmountable obstacle. However, in the long run, such instant solutions developed without discussion with the wider local community and well-considered links with other places and stakeholders, at least at the regional level, only rarely provide added value to the (tourist) products and services that cities offer.
Despite its laudable focus on ordinary Tokyo residents, this book also has some weaknesses. What stands out in the in­troduction (pp. 1–2) is excessively apol­ogetic self-reflection – inevitable in this field of study – which leads the reader to believe that, at a certain point in the process of writing the book, the authors (temporarily) yielded to the idea that only the Japanese can understand and objectively interpret Japanese culture. However, as many anthropological and sociological studies published since the 1990s demonstrate, Japan is not a culturally monolithic entity. Therefore even a native researcher might succumb to an ideological explanation of Tokyo’s urban creativity or gain unconventional insight into the research question. Ulti­mately, in the globalized academic com­munity, even native researchers usually employ Western theoretical approaches to explain typical elements of Japanese culture. Would the authors also have felt the need to question their foreignness if they had written about urban crea­tivity in some other global city, such as London?
In addition, what may bother the reader somewhat is the book’s Tokyo-centric­ity – which, on the whole and given the book’s title, is understandable, but a somewhat broader analytical perspec­tive would nonetheless have been an advantage. Tokyo is a vast and dense­ly populated post-metropolis, but the claim that it has a population of 38 million (p. 22) is incorrect. The pop­ulation of the administrative unit itself, officially known as the Tokyo Metropolis, which comprises twen­ty-three special wards (tokubetsu-ku), is officially just under 14 million, whereas the figure provided in the bookis, ac­cording to the latest data, roughly the population of greater Tokyo. However, this area also includes neighbouring Yokohama (Japan’s second-largest city), an administrative part of the Kanagawa prefecture. In their field research, Uršic and Imai also focus exclusively on the neighbourhoods under the jurisdic­tion of the Tokyo Metropolitan Gov­ernment. Moreover, it seems that the myriad of problems Tokyo is facing (p. 23) are nonetheless smaller than those of many other Japanese provincial cities and rural areas in general. The latter are affected by strong depopulation, result­ing from the fact that young people in particular are moving to the metropolis and other megacities along Japan’s Pa­cific coast in search of better education and employment opportunities. Even a brief visit to the interior of another nearby prefecture, Saitama, reveals the multi-layered social and economic im­pacts of this negative trend. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has slightly halted it, it would be premature to con­clude that it has also reversed it.
Despite the above, Creativity in Tokyo is highly useful and interesting read for spatial sociologists and anthropologists on the one hand, and for urban plan­ners, architects, and specialists in Japa­nese studies on the other, helping them understand the fluid urban character of this city.
Klemen Senica, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
E-mail: klemen.senica@phiz.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Biography
Matjaž Uršic is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and a research consultant at the Centre for Spatial Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. He has worked at several East Asian uni­versities, including Tokyo Metropoli­tan University, the University of Seoul, Soongsil University, and National Cheng Kung University. He is involved in various international research and development programmes to revitalize and change the role of urban centres, including H2020, RISE, the NRF Joint Research Program, Smart Urban Fu­tures ERA-NET, and ERDF.
 
Heide Imai is an associate professor in the Faculty of Intercultural Com­munication, Senshu University, Japan. She has taught at universities in Japan, the UK, and Germany. She is currently engaged in several research projects on urban problems and policies in Japan, Korea, and China. Her publications include Tokyo Roji (Routledge, 2017) and Asian Alleyways (with Marie Gib­ert-Flutre; Amsterdam University Press, 2019).
Information about the book
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-6687-5