Beyond the Metropolis: Local Moderns in Interwar Japan

FAIN: FT-54407-06

Louise Conrad Young
University of Wisconsin, Madison (Madison, WI 53715-1218)

This proposal seeks support to complete a research monograph on the social and cultural history of modern Japanese urbanism. In Japan, the teens and twenties were a period of rapid industrialization and urban growth, a time when urban electrification, the rise of the movie house and the department store, and the proliferation of streetcars and suburban railroads transformed the built environment of the city and the experience of urban life. To rethink a history that has been written largely from the perspective of Tokyo, I look at four provincial cities to explore the meanings of urban modernity in the world beyond the metropolis.