line, the razing of scores of stores and residences, and the destruction of neighborhoods in order to widen the road to accommodate the streetcars. A vibrant new commercial and entertainment strip sprang up on the foundation of old neighborhoods along the tracks, creating what would become the heart of “modern Kanazawa.”11
In Niigata, the municipal government had carried out wharf construction and port improvements continuously since 1907, dredging the Shinano River, improving the banks, building a breakwater, and erecting a lighthouse. When Niigata annexed Nuttari, its sister city on the opposite bank of the Shinano River, the two communities commenced construction on an elaborate new wharf to expand Niigata’s port facilities. At the same time, the city began an ambitious landfill project on the east side of the river, creating tracts of worker housing next to the industrial zone that was taking shape along the riverbank. The dredging, the riparian works, and the landfill dramatically reshaped the river and altered its course. In the space of a few years the river—which had been the economic and social center of these two port cities for generations—was utterly transformed.12
In Okayama, where a river also ran through the heart of the city, municipal government began to reconstruct the main Kyōbashi Bridge in 1915. After two years of work the old wooden structure was replaced with a reinforced concrete construction. Like the lighting of Sapporo’s streetlamps, the inaugural run of Kanazawa’s streetcar, or the ceremony marking the completion of Niigata’s wharf, the opening of Okayama’s new bridge was a moment of great civic pride. A photograph of the ceremony published March 25, 1917, shows the bridge thronged with people as they surged up from the embankments to step onto the bridge the San’yō shinpō proudly hailed as the “first reinforced concrete bridge in the prefecture.”13
In these ways, the pressures of the war years spurred municipalities to expand the range of urban amenities and develop basic infrastructure to accommodate the demands of a surging population and burgeoning local industry. As new electrical and telephone services became available, as cities created systems of mass transportation, as they widened and paved their roads, and as they improved sewer systems and expanded the supply of running water, the built environment of the city seemed to become a perpetual motion machine, the streetscape a site of ceaseless change. In the process, the modern city was identified with both the sheer, dizzying pace of change and the endless quest for technological improvement. Modernity signified the replacement of gas with electricity, of wood with concrete, of single stories with double, and double with triple. It meant roads became ever wider and rivers ever straighter. Destined for endless remaking, the modern city could never be finished.
Such notions of the city anticipated the epistemological shift in urban thought that took place in the wake of the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923. In a matter of hours the quake and the fires that followed destroyed vast sections of the Japanese capital. As a new, modern Tokyo arose atop the rubble of the old city, the earthquake became etched in popular memory as a watershed moment: the birth of a Japanese modern. The dramatic reconstitution of Tokyo’s built environment seemed to evacuate the capital of its past. But before the operatic scale of the earthquake turned all eyes toward Tokyo, the more modest dramas of the wartime construction booms brought urban residents throughout the country face to face with new meanings of the city. Though it was only after the earthquake that theorists of the modern such as Kon Wajirō and Gonda Yasunosuke began to connect the emergence of the new physical space of Tokyo with the possibility of creating a new urban culture called modanizumu (modernism), the groundwork for these ruminations was laid in the multifarious construction booms that took place in Japan’s smaller cities during the war years.14
Even as the construction boom coupled the concept of continuous change with the image of the modern city, the demonstrable failure of municipal infrastructural improvements to keep pace with explosive growth made it clear to municipal authorities, if not to urban residents, that there was no easy solution to the crisis of infrastructure. Like perpetual change, the ongoing crisis of infrastructure appeared to all to be a piece of the modern urban condition. In Okayama, just before the war broke out, the municipal authorities undertook a large improvement in the urban waterworks. Anticipating a population influx with the establishment of a local army division in the city, they planned to expand the water supply to accommodate the new residents. But the sudden urban growth spurred by the war boom threw this careful planning out the window. The rapid expansion of city industry caused water use to rise an unprecedented 27 percent per year. Even as the project was nearing completion, it became clear that increasing demand would strain the capacity of the new waterworks. The staggering pace of growth took city planners completely by surprise.15
In a similar vein, efforts of local authorities to improve and expand networks of roads in order to facilitate the flow of goods and people through the city met with a new and unexpected challenge: traffic. For Japan, World War One marked the advent of the automobile, which quickly became a major contributor to traffic congestion and bedlam in the streets. Initially fleets of cars were operated by transportation companies, which employed them to deliver goods to locations not served by the train. Taxi and bus companies soon followed, and the numbers of automobiles on the city streets increased. As a 1920 article in Okayama’s San’yō shinpō observed, “Although automobiles were a rarity three or four years ago, recently there has been a surprising and dramatic rise in the numbers of cars on the road.” By contemporary standards, local car ownership was quite modest. Okayama prefecture’s first car was purchased in 1912, and only 130 automobiles were registered by 1920; these operated almost exclusively in the capital and a few other cities.16 Statistics for Ishikawa prefecture and its capital city of Kanazawa were similar: the first car was bought in 1913 and only 130 were registered prefecture-wide by 1921, a year when eight different companies operated fleets of automobiles in the capital.
The problem was not so much the numbers of cars but the hazard a fast-moving, large-bodied vehicle constituted for the narrow and winding road networks that were the inheritance of Japan’s feudal cities. What with bicycles, jinrickshas, horse- and ox-drawn carts, and streetcars all sharing the roads with automobiles, “traffic” was beginning to register among the growing host of urban social problems. Although Kanazawa had leveled large sections of the downtown to create the new arterial road system that led through the city center, traffic surveys conducted barely a few years after road construction was completed revealed a new crisis at hand. A survey in April 1921 measuring the amount of traffic that traversed a level crossing near Kanazawa station showed that in a single day, on average, 5,976 pedestrians, 234 bicycles, 703 wagons, 49 carriages, and 5 automobiles made the crossing. This meant that trains were forced to wait at the crossing for a total of four and a half hours a day. As a local newspaper reported, the results of its own survey several years later showed that the deplorable degree of traffic congestion forced Kanazawa residents to move about “like rats trapped in a bag,” and the situation cried out for government intervention.17
All this suggested that urban growth had accelerated out of control. City boosters who earlier had observed with great satisfaction the leaps in productivity and the mushrooming of new factories now began to sound an ominous note. Their beloved city was rampantly expanding in unpredictable ways, creating an endless series of crises, a daily onslaught of demands for new services that the existing apparatus of municipal government seemed ill equipped to meet. Indeed, the stresses of the wartime construction boom, much like the “violent rise” in prices that overtook the latter years of industrial expansion, convinced urban elites of the need for a stronger hand at the helm. As Japan’s cities headed into the third decade of the twentieth century, the experience of the war boom demonstrated both the fantastic possibilities for economic growth and the need to bring some measure of control over its direction. The war boom convinced people that growth was good, but not violent, chaotic growth; this conviction helped fortify public support for a dramatic expansion in the municipal state. In these ways the experience of World War One laid the foundation for the era of city planning and municipal social engineering and stimulated a rethinking of the city idea.
THE GO-GO ECONOMY AND THE NARIKIN
The economic volatility and dramatic physical transformation of these years were mirrored in the domain of urban society. More than anything else, the figure of the narikin, or nouveau