This is the first book in English to examine the reconstruction of Japan's bombed cities after World War II. Five case studies (of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Osaka, Okinawa, and Nagaoka) are framed by broader essays on the evolution of Japanese planning and architecture, Japan's urban policies in Manchuria and comparisons between Japanese and European reconstruction.

Explains cultural, political, and social developments in post-World War II Japan.

This study of modern Japan traces the impact of defeat and reconstruction on every aspect of Japan's national life. It examines the economic resurgence as well as how the nation as a whole reacted to defeat and the end of a suicidal nationalism.

In 1945 Germany's cities lay in ruins, destroyed by Allied bombers `hat left major architectural monuments badly damaged and much of the housing stock reduced to rubble. At the war's end, observers thought that it would take forty years to rebuild, but by the late 1950s West Germany's cities had risen anew. The housing crisis had been overcome and virtually all important monuments reconstructed, and the cities had reclaimed their characteristic identities. Everywhere there was a mixture of old and new: historic churches and town halls stood alongside new housing and department stores; ancient street layouts were crossed or encircled by wide arteries; old city centers were balanced by garden suburbs laid out according to modern planning principles. In this book, Diefendorf examines the questions raised by this remarkable feat of urban reconstruction. He explains who was primarily responsible, what accounted for the speed of rebuilding, and how priorities were set and decisions acted upon. He argues that in such crucial areas as architectural style, urban planning, historic preservation, and housing policy, the Germans drew upon personnel, ideas, institutions, and practical experiences from the Nazi and pre-Nazi periods. Diefendorf shows how the rebuilding of West Germany's cities after 1945 can only be understood in terms of long-term continuities in urban development.

This book will address the destruction of urban forest in nine cities by bombing during World War II and the Bosnian War and their reconstruction in the post-war years. After reviewing the general objectives and results of aerial bombing, the book explores the effects of bombing and the reconstruction of urban forest in London, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, St. Petersburg, Stalingrad, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Sarajevo. Sarajevo stands out among these cities because the destruction of its urban forest was the result of citizens cutting down trees for firewood during the siege of the city. Most of the cities studied developed plans for reconstruction either during or after the war. These plans often addressed the planning and re-establishment of the urban forest that had been destroyed. Urban planners often planned for infrastructure improvements such as new boulevards and parks where trees would be planted. After the war many of these plans were abandoned or significantly modified. Cost, resistance by property owners, control of reconstruction by authorities outside of the cities, and the lack of planting stock were factors contributing to the failure of many of the plans. Exceptions occurred in Hiroshima and Coventry where the destroyed cities became symbols of national reconstruction and every effort was made to redesign the destroyed portions of these cities as memorials to those who lost their lives and to demonstrate the rebirth of the cities. In several of the cities studied individual citizens undertook on their own the replanting of street and park trees. Their ingenuity, hard work, and dedication to trees in their cities was remarkable. A common factor limiting efforts to replant street and park trees was the lack of nursery stock. During and immediately after the wars nearly all nurseries that had supplied trees for city planting had been converted to vegetable gardens to produce food for the urban populations. The slow return to the production of trees for urban planting was a common factor in the time required in many cities to restore their street and park trees. There are lessons to be learned by urban planner, urban forester, and landscape architects from this book that will be useful in the future destruction of urban forest either by natural or man-made causes.

The Hanshin Earthquake was the largest disaster to affect postwar Japan and one of the most destructive postwar natural disasters to strike a developed country. Although the media focused on the disaster's immediate effects, the long-term reconstruction efforts have gone largely unexplored. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, David Edgington records the first ten years of reconstruction and recovery and asks whether planners successfully exploited opportunities to make a more sustainable and disaster-proof city. This book is an intricate investigation of one of the largest redevelopment projects in recent memory.

Amid Japan’s political turbulence in 1960, seven architects and designers founded Metabolism to propagate radical ideas of urbanism. Kenzō Tange’s Plan for Tokyo 1960 further celebrated urban expansion as organic processes and pushed city design to an unprecedented scale. Metabolists’ visionary schemes of the city gave birth to revolutionary design paradigms, which reinvented the discourse of modern Japanese architecture and propelled it through the years of Economic Miracle to a global prominence. Their utopian concepts, which often envisaged the sea and the sky as human habitats of the future, reflected fundamental issues of cultural transformation and addressed environmental crises of the postindustrial society. This new edition expands Zhongjie Lin’s pathbreaking account on Tange and Metabolism centered at the intersection of urbanism and utopianism. The thorough historical survey, from Metabolism’s inauguration at the 1960 World Design Conference to the apex of the movement at Expo ’70 and further to the recent demolition of Nakagin Capsule Tower, leads to a definition of three Metabolist urban paradigms – megastructure, group form, and ruins – which continue to inspire experiments in architecture, city design, and conservation. Kenzō Tange and the Metabolist Movement is a key book for architectural and urban historians, architects, and all those interested in avant-garde design, Japanese architecture, and contemporary urbanism.

Although Japan’s beer industry dates back nearly 145 years, to date there has been no English-language source documenting its origins, growth, and evolution. Spanning the earliest attempts to brew beer to the recent popularity of local craft brews, Brewed in Japan explores beer’s steady rise to become today’s “beverage of the masses.” Alexander sheds light on the advent of Western-style taverns and beer gardens, the control of beer production by Japan’s Ministry of Finance during the Second World War, the rapid rise in women’s beer consumption postwar, and the continued dominance of long-surviving firms such as Asahi, Kirin, and Sapporo. Featuring an array of Japanese sources, this book further illustrates how post-war marketing campaigns and shifting consumer preferences made beer Japan’s leading alcoholic beverage by the 1960s.

Introduction to Part II - Kären Wigen -- Mapping the City -- 13. Characteristics of Premodern Urban Space - Tamai Tetsuo -- 14. Evolving Cartography of an Ancient Capital - Uesugi Kazuhiro -- 15. Historical Landscapes of Osaka - Uesugi Kazuhiro -- 16. The Urban Landscape of Early Edo in an East Asian Context - Tamai Tetsuo -- 17. Spatial Visions of Status - Ronald P. Toby -- 18. The Social Landscape of Edo - Paul Waley -- 19. What Is a Street? - Mary Elizabeth Berry -- Sacred Sites and Cosmic Visions -- 20. Locating Japan in a Buddhist World - D. Max Moerman

Triggered in part by contemporary experiences in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere, there has been a rise in interest in the blitz and the subsequent reconstruction of cities, especially as many of the buildings and areas rebuilt after the Second World War are now facing demolition and reconstruction in their turn. Drawing together leading scholars and new researchers from across the fields of planning, history, architecture and geography, this volume presents an historical and cultural commentary on the immediate and longer-term impacts of wartime destruction. The book's contents in 14 chapters cover the spread of themes from experiencing the war to reconstruction and its experiences; and although many chapters draw upon the UK experience, there is deliberate inclusion of some material from mainland Europe and Japan to emphasise that the experiences, processes and products are not London-specific. A comparative book tracing destruction to reconstruction is a relative rarity, and yet of the utmost importance in possessing wider relevance to post-disaster reconstructions. The Blitz and Its Legacy is a fascinating volume which includes war experiences of destruction, architecture, urban design, the political process of planning and reconstruction, and also popular perceptions of rebuilding. Its findings provide very timely lessons which highlight the value of learning from historical precedent.