“Friendly authoritarianism” and the bedtaun: public space in a Japanese suburb

Abstract

In the West, public space ideally serves as the open, transformative core of urban democratic society. But what role does it play in a non-Western democracy with anti-individualist, authoritarian cultural mores, such as in Japan? The author used archival research, direct observations and informal interviews, as well as reference to key insights of actor-network theory (ANT) to investigate whether or not the public spaces of a Japanese suburb are conducive to individual freedom and expression. The paper concludes that these spaces help maintain what Sugimoto (1997) calls the “friendly authoritarianism” of Japanese society.

Keywords:

• public space
• suburbs
• Japan

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr. Toru Ishikawa of the University of Tokyo and three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. It should be noted that neither has Japan had the equivalent of FHA-backed mortgage financing, “redlining” or other associated structural factors that contributed to “white flight” and the accompanying socio-economic disparities between central cities and suburbs in the United States (Jackson 1985).

2. One should not infer from this the claim that Japan is unique in being an arena of dueling centrifugal and centripetal forces; virtually all societies can be so described.

3. For example, if a resident of sub-section 1 of a chonaikai does a favor (even an unsolicited one) for a resident of sub-section 2, then other members of sub-section 2 may feel that they have incurred an obligation. (The Japanese phrase “arigata meiwaku” means “gratitude-imposing nuisance” (Applbaum 1996, p. 22).) Similarly, residents of a chonaikai may feel obligated to join ancillary groups endorsed by their chonaikai leaders. The in-group obligations that come with chonaikai membership can be so onerous that some residents withdraw utterly from neighborhood life in order to avoid them (Applbaum 1996).

4. Crime statistics indicate that Higashiyamato experiences relatively little crime. For example, during the five-year period from 2006-2010, the murder rate was 1.92 per 100,000 persons. By comparison, the Los Angeles murder rate in 2010 was 7.5 per 100,000 persons—the lowest rate the city had seen since 1967 and one of the lowest among the nation's large cities that year (Rubin and Faturechi, 2010). In 2010, Higashiyamato experienced a “violent offense” rate of 8.4 per 100,000 persons, a theft rate of 18.97 per 100,000 persons (an anomaly, for though it represented a small gross increase in such crimes it was almost twice the average of the previous four years) and a vice-related crime rate of 0.72 per 1000 persons (Department of General Affairs 2011).

5. Latour (1999) later bemoaned how the internet has obscured the original connotations of the word.