Beyond the Metropolis is an enormously wide-ranging book that seeks to treat the interrelations of all the elements—material, psychological, intellectual, political, cultural, demographic—that constituted and propelled Japan's rapid urbanization in the wake of World War I. Focusing on Niigata, Okayama, Kanazawa, and Sapporo, Louise Young makes a compelling case that urbanized modernity in Japan did not converge into homogenized lesser imitations of the Tokyo metropolis, but was driven in large part by local inflections. Her thesis goes one step further: the cities, including “second cities” and their regional hinterlands, actually took over from the nation as a whole the role of primary driver of the course of modernization in Japan between 1918 and 1937.
The material side of the urbanization phenomenon is the most straightforward. Railroads changed everything. In the Meiji period, the national government sponsored the initial expansion of the railroad system, picking routes concentrated on the Pacific side...
