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NATIVE AND NEWCOMER: Making and Remaking a Japanese city. By Jennifer Robertson. Berkeley (California): University of California Press. 1991. xvii, 235 pp. (Figures, maps, tables.) US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 0-520-07296-0.
NOT LONG AGO many Japanese were confidently predicting the flight of people, even power, from Tokyo. Convinced that the "advanced information age" of "wired cities" and magnetic levitation railways would liberate millions of Tokyoites from "commuter hell," they envisioned an epochal era of urban resettlement along the Tokaido Belt. They were wrong: Tokyo itself experienced unbridled demographic expansion. By the mid-1980s, it was home to one of every four Japanese and had grown to define urban life in Japan.
In 1983, Jennifer Robertson made her way to Greater Tokyo--specifically, to the bed town" of Kodaira twenty-odd kilometers from the central business district--to conduct a "historical anthropological study of village-making." Yes, "village-making" in the supermetropolis. As Native and Newcomer reminds us, the furusato-zukuri ("old-village" making) movement that swept Japan in the 1970s and eighties was an overwhelmingly urban affair. It was not about old villages, after all, but about old village life....