Vision and practice: the 1967 Robson Report on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government

ABSTRACT

This article critically evaluates a 1967 consultancy report on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) by Professor William A. Robson. Robson, a pioneer of public administration science based at the London School of Economics his whole academic life, provided an in-depth analysis of the state of the Japanese capital during its high-speed growth spurt and at the beginning of the socialist Minobe prefectural administration. While many of Robson's assessments and criticisms were poignant, his report failed to appreciate contextual intricacies as well as Tokyo's distinctive path of urban development. A re-reading of the report with this in mind expands our understanding of the Japanese capital's postwar history more than 50 years after the report's publication. Its critical assessment also contributes to our understanding of how urban knowledge ‘travels’ across geographies.

KEYWORDS:

• Tokyo
• postwar
• policy transfer
• policy mobility
• urban consultants

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Professor Jordan Sand for feedback on the draft manuscript as well as his mentorship. Professor Kaoru Sugihara provided important intellectual guidance throughout the research. Anonymous reviewers added significant value with their comments. The initial idea for this paper was presented at the AAS 2022 panel ‘Tokyo before the 1980s as a World City in the Making: Metabolist Architecture, Inter-city Diplomacy, and Urban Expertises’. All remaining errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hebbert, “William Robson, the Herbert Commission.”

2 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 1–2; Robson produced a follow-up report in 1969, focusing primarily on ‘new town developments’ (Robson, Second Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government).

3 Robson also published a succinct summary of his assessments in the British centre-left New Society magazine in 1970 (Robson, “The Other Tokyo”).

4 Robson, “The Other Tokyo,” 683.

5 Inherent frictions between prefectural administration and central government both preceded and outlasted the Minobe administration. The size of the Tokyo metropolis made its governor a political figure with a national profile. This continues to this day, as evident in the Koike administration and the conflict over the cost for the 2020 Olympics (see Aoyama, “The Conflict between the Country”).

6 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 3.

7 The term ‘Tokyo’ is often used interchangeably for the eponymous prefecture (administered by TMG) and the larger Tokyo urban agglomeration, which includes the urbanized parts of the adjacent prefectures of Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa. Tokyo prefecture (Tokyo-to) consists of the 23 special wards (Tokubetsu-ku) and several cities, towns and villages in the Tama region and islands. The special wards are home to about 80% of the prefecture's population.

8 Dolowitz and Marsh have defined policy transfer as a process in which ‘knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions etc. in one time and/or place is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements and institutions in another time and/or place’ (“Who Learns What from Whom,” 344). The terms lesson drawing (Rose, “What Is Lesson-Drawing?”) and policy learning (Evans, Policy Transfer in Global Perspective) are often used interchangeably.

9 Stone, “Lesson Drawing and Policy Transfer,” 55; Cook, Ward, and Ward, “A Springtime Journey to the Soviet Union,” 806.

10 McCann, “Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge,” 109; this paper represents the theoretical foundation of the critical urban policy mobilities discourse.

11 Cook, “Policy Mobilities and Interdisciplinary Engagement,” 835.

12 Bertram, “Accounting for Culture in Policy Transfer,” 89.

13 Jones, Live Machines; Gluck, “Book Review of Live Machines.”

14 Westney, Imitation and Innovation.

15 Ibid., 221.

16 Gordon, “Book Review of Imitation to Innovation,” 185.

17 Ibid.

18 Harris and Moore, “Planning Histories and Practices of Circulating,” 1501; Watanabe, “Garden City, Japanese Style.”

19 Smith, “Tokyo as an Idea,” 62.

20 Hanes, “Pacific Crossings?” 57.

21 See Gantner and Hein-Kircher, Interurban Knowledge Exchange, on the exchange of urban ideas among Southern and Eastern Europe cities from 1870 to 1950 and Cook, Ward, and Ward, “A Springtime Journey to the Soviet Union,” on reciprocal visits of town planning professionals from Britain and the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

22 In the late 1960s, Minobe's secretary quipped that Tokyo still had to deal with ‘both the problems of Calcutta and the problems of New York’ (Hein, Reasonable Men, Powerful Words, 197).

23 On North-South town-twinning initiatives in the postwar period see Clarke, “Actually Existing Comparative Urbanism,” 802–3; visits by American planning professionals to post-independence India are discussed in Banerjee, “U.S. Planning Expeditions to Postcolonial India.”

24 Gradually, the diffusion of planning knowledge in a post-colonial context became less of a one-way street from developed West to underdeveloped South, when ‘[b]y the 1970s, planners from aid-recipient countries became noticeably more assertive’ (Ward, “Transnational Planners in a Postcolonial World,” 133).

25 See McCann, “Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge”; Teipelke, Urban Development Consultants.

26 Kochan, “Introduction: London Government,” 4.

27 Davis, “London's Evolution,” 12–3.

28 G. Jones, “The Greater London Group after 50 Years,” 17.

29 Tsubaki, “Anglo-Japanese Exchanges in Town Planning.”

30 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 1.

31 TMG, Tokyo for the People, foreword.

32 see e.g. Robson, “The Other Tokyo.”

33 Tsubaki, “Anglo-Japanese Exchanges in Town Planning,” 7.

34 TIMR, Robuson hōkoku no kenkyū.

35 This is not to downplay the importance of the other two co-founders, Takahashi Masao and Komori Takeshi, see e.g. Narumi, “Senji-chū kakushin to sengo kakushin”; and McDougall, Political Leadership in Contemporary Japan, for more details.

36 For more details on the ideological foundations of the Minobe administration, see L. Hein, Reasonable Men, Powerful Words.

37 Rix, “Tokyo's Governor Minobe and Progressive,” 533. The same paper contains more detail on Minobe's policies during his first two out of a total of three terms in office.

38 Special Wards Council, Tōkyō daitoshi chiiki no monogatari 4, 25.

39 For a discussion of the ‘civil minimum’, see Bansal, Urban Space in Economic History, 224–35.

40 Robson, “The Other Tokyo,” 684; I thank an anonymous reviewer for informing this section. For a more detailed account on the various commission's reports from a special ward perspective, see Special Wards Council, Tōkyō daitoshi chiiki no monogatari 4, 23 ff.

41 TMG, Tōkyō o kangaeru.

42 An abridged English edition of the white paper came out as Sizing up Tokyo: A Report of Tokyo Under the Administration of Governor Ryōkichi Minobe (TMG, 1969b).

43 There were in fact important disagreements, e.g. over a more onerous land value tax reform, which Robson advocated in order to rein into rising land prices (Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 35) but which the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP) opposed at that stage. It is also noteworthy that the 1969 White Paper is relatively agnostic about how to address the problem of rising land prices (TMG, Sizing up Tokyo, 81). I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

44 See Morie, Tokyo Reconstructed, for more on the conference and its contextualization within inter-city diplomacy.

45 TMG, Sizing Up Tokyo, 43–5.

46 For a list of the chapters in the 1967 Robson Report, please consult Annex 2. Concise summaries of the report are in TIMR, Robuson hōkoku no kenkyū; and Shindo, “Robuson hōkoku to gendai toshi.” Both also feature a summary table of all the report's sections.

47 The reader is referred to Annex 1, in which a summary of the research findings has been collated. I thank an anonymous reviewer for the suggestion.

48 TIMR, Robuson hōkoku no kenkyū, 5; 178–86.

49 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 9.

50 Ibid., 9.

51 Ibid., 10.

52 Ibid., 11.

53 Ibid., 12.

54 Ibid., 14–5.

55 Robson had not been the first foreigner with radical – and borrowed – ideas to redraw Tokyo's administrative map. During the Occupation, GHQ thought that the solution to this wrangling over decision-making authority would ‘not be found in simply strengthening the existing 23 wards’. Instead, the solution lay in further administrative reform, eventually ‘abolishing the numerous special wards and substituting them with about five units of government similar to the boroughs in Greater New York’ (Ōta Ward Assembly, “Petition Regarding Enforcement of Autonomous Municipality,” 17).

56 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 18.

57 Besides the topic getting significant attention in the Mid-Term Plan and 1969 White Paper, several other examples are listed in TIMR, Robuson hōkoku no kenkyū, 5–7.

58 Ōta Ward Assembly, “Petition Regarding Enforcement of Autonomous Municipality,” 32.

59 Self, “Rondon to Tōkyō,” 5–6.

60 Ohsugi, The Large City System of Japan.

61 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 62

62 I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.

63 Self, “Rondon to Tōkyō,” 34. It is hard to precisely determine the degree of ‘civic spirit’ within the Tokyo prefecture, but the nationally important political position of Tokyo's governor mentioned above is noteworthy. On political identities at a more local level, see Allison, Suburban Tokyo.

64 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 17.

65 Ibid., 19.

66 Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan, 157.

67 Takemae, Inside GHQ, 303.

68 Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan, 158.

69 Vogel, “Decentralization and Urban Governance.”

70 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 30.

71 Ibid., 41.

72 See TMG, Transition of Tokyo's Urban Planning; and Hein et. al., “Rebuilding Urban Japan after 1945.”

73 Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan.

74 TMG, A Hundred Years of Tokyo City Planning, 56.

75 Cited in Tsubaki, “Anglo-Japanese Exchanges in Town Planning,” 9.

76 Uchiyama and Okabe, Categorization of 48 Mega-Regions.

77 Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan.

78 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 24.

79 See for example Breach, Capital Cities, 28.

80 Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan, 221.

81 Hohn, 2000, as cited in Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan, 222.

82 Hebbert, “Urban Sprawl and Urban Planning in Japan,” 156.

83 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 90–7.

84 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 90; TIMR, Robuson hōkoku no kenkyū, 134.

85 Lefèvre, “Urban Governance of Megacities,” 83; Robson has a section in his report dedicated to this topic, see Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 105–10.

86 TMG, Budget of Tokyo for Fiscal 1969, 24–38.

87 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 95.

88 Tran, Drew and Noguchi, “The Role of Revenue Volatility,” 447. The article shows that local governments relying more on local taxes than on grants generally exhibit higher expenditure volatility.

89 TMG, Bureau of Finance Presentation, 7–9.

90 The Centre for London recently recommended a redistribution system between the boroughs to ‘ensure [that] revenue matches council tax requirements’ (Brown and Bosetti, Open City, 68). It might even be more complicated to institute such a system in the developing world given the lack of institutional capacity and entrenched political and class interests manifesting itself within city boundaries (Martínez-Martín, Monitoring intra-urban inequalities), leading to urban administrative units resisting fiscal transfers (Kilroy, Intra-Urban Spatial Inequalities, 18).

91 Ito, “Equalization of Local Finance in Japan,” 57.

92 Vogel, “Decentralization and Urban Governance,” 132.

93 TMG, Budget of Tokyo for Fiscal 1969, 10.

94 The special ward financial adjustment system redistributes revenue vertically between TMG and the wards in a manner similar to the national Local Allocation Tax system, and horizontally among the 23 wards directly.

95 A popular social dichotomy used in Tokyo is the shitamachi / yamanote distinction, with the former denoting the traditionally working-class areas to the east of the Imperial Palace and the latter denoting the more affluent areas in the west (see Waley, “Moving the Margins of Tokyo,” for a discussion and fluidity of the term shitamachi).

96 Steiner, Local Government in Japan, 195.

97 For more details and data on the above, see Bansal, Urban Space in Economic History, 183–96.

98 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 75.

99 Ibid., 72.

100 Today there are two subway operators, i.e. Toei Subway (operated by TMG) and Tokyo Metro (operated by the Tokyo Metro Co., whose majority owner is the Japanese government, and in which TMG is a minority shareholder).

101 Ibid., 76–7.

102 Figures from Le, Oka, and Kato, “Efficiencies of the Urban Railway Lines.”

103 Kato, Challenges in Better Coordinating.

104 Terada, “Railways in Japan,” 52.

105 Saito, “Japanese Private Railway Companies.”

106 Calimente, “Rail Integrated Communities in Tokyo.”

107 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 47.

108 Ibid., 49.

109 Ibid., 47.

110 Ibid., 50. Upon visiting municipal housing in Edogawa Ward, Professor Robson jokingly enquired whether these buildings were part of a prison complex (Nakamura, “Robuson hōkoku to Tōkyō shisei chōsakai,” 52).

111 Ibid., 51.

112 In 1967, the year of Robson's first report, social expenditure as a share of GDP was 4.7% in Japan vs. 11.4% in the United Kingdom (OECD, Social Expenditure Update).

113 Sugihara, “Varieties of Industrialization.”

114 UK Department for Communities and Local Governments, 50 Years of the English Housing Survey.

115 Robson, Report on Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 35.

116 see Neitzel, The Life We Longed For. Rather than public housing, public funds earmarked for housing were disproportionately spent on subsidizing housing loans to owner-occupiers (Ronald, “Home Ownership, Ideology and Diversity”).

117 Bansal, “Intra-Urban Inequalities during Rapid Development.”

118 Bansal, “Generic Neighborhood Features of an Egalitarian City.”

119 Self, “Rondon to Tōkyō,” 5.

120 Bineth, “Towards a Sociology of Curiosity”; proposes that curiosity is a social phenomenon (i.e. an ‘epistemic drive’ which motivates and organizes society's knowledge production processes), and that it can be extended to social groups and institutions.

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Benjamin Bansal

Benjamin Bansal holds a PhD in Development Studies from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. His research focuses on postwar Tokyo's urban economic history and how far the Japanese capital's experience might be instructive for other (Asian) megacities. His articles on the subject have been published in Cities, International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development and Social Science Japan Journal.