Even as the Low City and its culture were melted down by the great media waves emanating from the High, so the city itself and the provinces are being fused into one great mass. The mayor of Honolulu has observed that his city is by way of becoming a suburb of Tokyo. Even Osaka, for all its originality in the realm of the sensually explicit, might make the same observation; and the son of Tokyo might complain, as Tanizaki did not cease to complain, that his city too is losing something in the process. Its chief claim today might be that it is more Japanese than Japan, in the sense of having far the greatest concentrations of glass, steel, and computerized information. A loss of individuality has occurred even as the concentration of money and power in Tokyo has approached totality.
It may be almost impossible for foreigners to buy a bit of Japan unless it be in the remote provinces, and it is becoming impossible for most Japanese to buy a bit of Tokyo.
One of the most popular little stunts at drinking places has to do with the ten-thousand-yen bank note and the price of land. The note, the largest printed by the Japanese government, is worth about eighty dollars, value shifts somewhat from day to day. A person is told to fold one of the notes as tightly as possible. Take it down to Ginza and drop it, the instructions continue; it will not buy the bit of land upon which it falls.
There are pieces of information that go the rounds, such as that if the lands on which the palace stands were to be sold and converted at going exchange rates, the dollars that resulted could buy the whole state of California. The exchange rate, a product of trade balances, here has its magical effect, because dollars buy far more than yen do in relation to their values on the exchange. So the piece of information has as much to do with exchange rates as with real values. The stunt too is a little exaggerated. Experiment determines that a ten-thousand-yen note can be folded into an area of about two square centimeters. So it would take five thousand of the notes, or fifty million yen, or some four hundred thousand dollars (in which once more the magic of the exchange rate has its effect), to cover a patch a meter square. The annual survey of land prices by the National Land Agency determined that at the end of 1987 the highest price for land sampled in Ginza, near the main Ginza crossing, was thirty-four million yen. So it is an exaggeration, though it is within the bounds of the pardonable, and, as with the matter of the palace and California, emphasizes the fact that land in Tokyo is insanely valuable.
Seven of the ten most valuable pieces of commercial property are in the three central wards, Chiyoda, Chūō, and Minato. As for residential property, the first nine are in the three wards, the tenth is in Shibuya. The most valuable piece of residential property, in Chiyoda Ward just to the northwest of the palace, commanded a price of a little more than twelve million yen, or not far from a hundred thousand dollars, per square meter.
On the assumption that the salaryman cannot risk more than five times his annual pay on a bit of land and a house, the price of the land must be kept within a hundred fifty thousand yen per square meter. Only on the northern and eastern fringes of the old city—the northern part of Asakusa, the wards east of the Sumida—do land prices fall below a million yen per square meter. Nowhere to the west or south do they do so. A square meter may be had for less than a half million along the other fringes of the ward part of the prefecture, and nowhere within the wards does the price fall below a hundred thousand. For this one must go out west where the mountains begin, a distance of some fifty kilometers, or more than thirty miles, from the center of the city.
The situation is little better in the neighboring prefectures, though prices do not rise to such heights. The most expensive land in central Yokohama is worth under ten million yen per square meter. Yet one must go as far as Narita Airport and a kilometer or two onward from the station by other means to find land in Chiba Prefecture for under a hundred thousand yen. One must go to the farther reaches of Saitama Prefecture for such land, and the makers of the survey found none at all in Kanagawa Prefecture (Yokohama).
Narita is about sixty kilometers from the center of the city. This is now considered reasonable commuting distance. One can get to the airport by the fastest express trains in an hour if one happens to be at Ueno Station, but of course commuters tend not to live either in the station or in the airport, nor are express trains always at hand. The commuting life has produced a subculture. The proliferation of sensational photograph and cartoon magazines answers to the needs of people who do not sleep very well on trains and do not want to think. Then there has been the rise of the chikan, rendered by the big Japanese-English dictionary as “a molester of women” and “American slang: a masher.” No pretty girl who rides crowded trains is free from his attentions, though they are seldom more serious than pawing and pinching.
So the middle class is giving up hope of owning houses in the Tokyo wards. Even the tiny condominium apartment is slipping beyond its dreams. In recent years we started hearing the word okushon. This sounds very much like the Japanization of “auction,” and was probably in part suggested by it, but more than that it is a variant and pun upon manshon or “mansion,” which for practical purposes means a multistoryed condominium building. The first syllable of “mansion,” homophonous with the word for “ten thousand,” is converted to oku, “a hundred million.” So an okushon is a condominium apartment that sells for a hundred million yen, not far from a million dollars at present exchange rates. A recent survey by an association of builders and realestate dealers concluded that the average price for a new condominium of twenty and more square meters within Tokyo Prefecture has now passed a hundred million yen.
There remains a small glimmer of hope, the public-housing condominium. It is very small. Four of the five complexes that drew the largest number of applicants were in neighboring prefectures, and only one, third in popularity among the five, was in Tokyo, in the ward farthest to the north and west of the twenty-three. The most popular complex was on filled land near the western edge of Chiba Prefecture, in the town of Urayasu, which also contains Tokyo Disneyland. There were more than three hundred fifty applications for each available apartment.
The problem is very much one of land speculation, and very much a Tokyo problem. Until recently land prices were rising in the Tokyo region at about three times the national rate, more than three times the rate for the Osaka region, and almost eight times that for the Nagoya region. Very recent surveys suggest that prices may be leveling off and even falling slightly. Real-estate companies are going bankrupt at a rate that cannot be explained by the general state of the economy, and if bankruptcies are ever welcome they are in these circumstances. Government measures, such as tax penalties, restrictions on credit, and licensing in the case of large transactions, may be having an effect. It may be too that a ceiling must inevitably be reached. Speculation works only as long as there is a purchaser who will pay more than the seller did.
The huge Westmouth buildings rise beyond the trees of Shinjuku Royal Gardens.
The decline, if there is one, is far from enough to make the city once again accessible to the middle class, and a sharp decline is highly unlikely. Bank assets are very intimately associated with land prices. The banks are at the center of the Establishment, which cannot be expected to inconvenience itself unless a massive popular rising forces it to. In some countries we might expect exactly this to happen. In Japan the commuter sighs and goes on commuting. So the “my” in the governor’s My Town seems by way of referring to billionaires and ragpickers and scarcely anyone between.
If there is a threat to the position of Ginza as the mercantile heart of the city, it is probably land prices. Perhaps Ginza is being strangled by its own desirability. Transactions in Ginza land are rare, but such recent ones as have occurred suggest that it is even more valuable than the 1987 survey has it, approaching forty million yen per square meter. There are spots in Shimbashi and Shinjuku where land prices approach the Ginza level. Marunouchi, which is managerial and
not mercantile, rises to Ginza levels. Yet Ginza is the place that has most clearly the look of being choked by land prices. Ginza shops that have expanded into chains make their money from branches elsewhere and keep their main Ginza stores for advertising. The assets of the ones that have not expanded are mostly in real estate. So it has been aptly observed that Ginza has become a place of advertising and real-estate enterprises. This is worrisome for those who hope that the Ginza center holds, though it does not take into account enterprises, such as the department stores, big enough to make money even on Ginza land.
For about a quarter of a century there has been talk, the first serious talk since 1923, of moving the capital from Tokyo. In 1963 the construction minister, he who was known during the Olympic years as the minister of the waterworks, proposed building a new capital in the hills above Hamamatsu, which is at about the halfway point between Tokyo and Osaka. The National Land Agency has undertaken studies of the matter. The prime minister has directed the removal of minor parts of the bureaucracy from Tokyo. Among other places suggested for a new capital have been Sendai, to the north of Tokyo, and Osaka. The president of the Suntory whiskey company remarked of Sendai in 1988 that it is in the land of the Kumaso. By this he meant “barbarians,” but he got his tribe wrong: the Kumaso, mentioned in the earliest chronicles, dwelt at the other end of the realm, in southern Kyushu. He made a political and tactical error as well. The Tohoku district, of which Sendai is the largest city, organized a boycott which had a pronounced effect on Suntory sales. A politician—not, of course, from Osaka, and therefore immune to reprisals—called Osaka a spittoon. So talk of moving the capital has had its diverting moments.
It is very unlikely to occur, barring another disaster. The interests of too large a part of the Establishment are too much a part of Tokyo. Even effective and outspoken critics of Tokyo as the overwhelming center of everything worth being a center of are doubtful that it will occur. Among the most effective of them has been Hosokawa Morihiro, governor of the land of the Kumaso, Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu. He does not look forward to anything very drastic.
“There is talk of several capitals and of moving the capital. The proposal to move the functions now concentrated in the capital to the slopes of Mount Fuji or Sendai or some such place does not seem to me realistic. It will not be practical for the crucial agencies charged with finances, foreign policy, and defense. Yet I do think that when no great weakening of government functions is likely to occur plans should be made for moving to the provinces. I think of the Hokkaido Development Board and the Okinawa Development Board…. For the Japanese islands to be a balanced organism and not just an oversized head, greater vitality must be looked for in the provinces, even as Tokyo goes on developing.”
Of course the big managers will stay where the “crucial agencies” are. Nearness to the center is very important to them, even though some of them too may feel the Tokyo pinch. Shinnittetsu, the biggest Japanese steel company, owned a Marunouchi building (actually in Otemachi, just to the north) jointly with Mitsui until 1967. Now it rents from Mitsubishi at four billion yen a year, or well over thirty million dollars. Without land in the center of Tokyo, and it has none, not even Shinnittetsu could construct a Tokyo building of its own if it wanted to.
No Marunouchi land has changed hands in the past ten years. If a bit were to come on the market and a potential buyer asked to make an offer, it would probably be: “Whatever you want.” Mitsubishi says that some three hundred fifty companies are waiting for Marunouchi space, and that to accommodate them all some fifty acres of new space would be required.
Governor Suzuki agrees with Governor Hosokawa. “The other forty-six prefectures, even Saitama, all have offices in Tokyo…. It will not be practical in undisturbed times to move the capital from Tokyo. In the absence of natural disasters and bombings and revolutions such as the Meiji Restoration, it will not be easy.”
The three stops in Urawa, prefectural seat of Saitama Prefecture, are the third, fourth, and fifth beyond the Tokyo limits on the main commuter line to the north. Even this proximity, the governor is saying, is not enough. The pull of Tokyo is so strong that even Saitama must have offices there.
The concentration of money and power in Tokyo is to a degree unthinkable in the United States. A reasonable estimate might be that a third of large American companies have their head offices in or near New York. Many of them are trying to get away, and succeeding. There is little indication, despite costs that would seem prohibitive in most places, of a similar efflux from Tokyo and the Kantō region. It has been influx the whole time. Until the Second World War the Kansai might salve its wounded pride at having ceased to be the political center of the land by saying, and not without grounds, that it continued to be the commercial center. While it is true that the Kansai is more wholeheartedly commercial than the Kantō, and may thus make the ancient argument of sincerity and dedication, the argument no longer has much force.
When a big company (examples are Matsushita and the big automobile companies) does not have its head office in Tokyo, it has a branch office so large that the distinction between the two, main office and branch, seems to come down to long-term finance and management on the one hand and day-to-day operations on the other. Some companies make this fact more obvious by having head offices both in Tokyo and in Osaka.
Nor is the concentration only economic and bureaucratic. A “literary” memorandum book which happens to be at hand lists the addresses and telephone numbers of some four hundred institutions and organizations likely to answer to the needs of literary and artistic persons. Only seven of them have the high postal numbers that reveal them to be situated at a distance from the center: an association of photographers in Osaka, a publishing house apiece in Osaka and Kyoto, a paper manufacturer in Shizuoka, and three advertising agencies, in Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.
Of the nine hundred or so artistic and intellectual types listed in the same memorandum book, only about a tenth reside beyond commuting distance of Tokyo. Of these a considerable number are university professors residing in Kyoto, to remind us of a rare element in Japanese cultural life in which a modicum of decentralization remains. Kyoto University continues to be the other university, the only one with something like the prestige of Tokyo University, and offering its graduates something like the same ticket of entry to the realm of the elite.
In one field it offers the better ticket. Kyoto University produces winners of Nobel Prizes in the sciences, and so that is where the brightest would-be scientists go. Governor Suzuki recently called our attention, with wry humor, to the fact that his grandson had just entered the college of physics at Tokyo University, and that it was the only college in the university short of new students. Those who passed both in Tokyo and in Kyoto chose to go to the latter. In the realm of power—law, politics, economics—it is the opposite. Most of the very bright boys and girls of the land, when they have passed the entrance examinations of both universities, choose Tokyo. Its ticket is much the more reliable. This fact is behind moves on the part of Kyoto University to have its entrance examinations held on the same day as Tokyo University, and so make it impossible for even the brightest to pass both. They must choose in advance, and spare Kyoto University humiliation.
The concentration of students and universities in Tokyo is impressive, if not quite so impressive as the concentration of big companies, publishing houses, and artistic types. A third of the colleges and universities in the country are in Tokyo, and half the students. There has been some dispersal of universities from the ward part of Tokyo, but the concentration in Greater Tokyo remains. The new Tsukuba university and research complex in southern Ibaragi Prefecture more than makes up for the old University of Education, its core, once situated in the same ward as Tokyo University. (Among the principal attributes of Tsukuba is its dullness. One might have expected an explosion, with tens of thousands of hot-blooded young people suddenly put down in the mid
dle of nowhere, and Narita Airport and all its controversy so near at hand. It has not happened. The day of pulverizing universities mysteriously passed—though the explosion may be hanging fire.)
Such general statistics fade into insignificance beside the fact that graduates of Tokyo University, and to a lesser extent Kyoto University, will one day rule the land. The graduate of a provincial university is lucky if he gets a position with City Hall or the local police force.
Osaka has now been subjected to the indignity of becoming the thirdlargest city in the land. It has been passed in population by a Tokyo bedroom city, Yokohama. Though it is a considerable center in its own right, the fact that Yokohama is a bedroom city is clear. The proportion of its daytime to its nighttime population is the lowest for any of the ten largest Japanese cities.
So Tokyo is and has almost everything, and many a son of the city might say that it has lost the most important thing, its identity. Americanization, though often blamed, is not responsible. Not much of Tokyo looks like an American city, and very little of it feels like one. The loss of identity is the result of the very Japanese process of homogenization. Everything is subsumed unto Tokyo and Tokyo is subsumed unto everything; and the nation marches victoriously on, untroubled by the insistence on separateness and difference that troubles so many nations.
Plans and dreams for the future of the city do not have to do exclusively with high technology and company offices, but they tend strongly in those directions. Nor, though again the tendency is strong, do they have to do entirely with the central wards. High-rise blocks, many of them under the auspices of the various wards, will be scattered over the city if the plans come to fruition. There will be new “new towns” out in the county part of the prefecture, and better facilities, such as transportation, for the ones already there.
Tokyo from Edo to Showa 1867-1989 Page 72