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The city of Tokyo has been a space where numerous forms of sexual subcultures and their histories have been born. This paper discusses one possible way of understanding queer space in Tokyo. Examining the discourses concerning Shinjuku Ni-chōme, a queer neighbourhood in Tokyo, I argue that this queer space functions as a discursive site of containment as well as resistance to hetero-normative narratives of the metropolis. Drawing on queer theories that focus on the notion of space, in this paper I demonstrate that queer space is often marginalised by mainstream society, but at the same time it can be a critical site through which to investigate hetero-normativity. I suggest that queers themselves sometimes deploy their own delegitimised status to construct a queer counter-public space that intervenes in and disorients the linear narrative of hetero-normative views. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the changing definition of marriage for young women in Tokyo over the last 10 years. Based on fieldwork research conducted in Tokyo, I examine why women are delaying or refusing marriage, arguing that women’s decisions can best be understood in relation to work. I discuss how young women negotiate their conception of marriage by articulating their desires for self-realization, a career, and participation in society, within the context of a flexibilization of work and the transformation of family in contemporary Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focuses on the unified local elections in Tokyo, Japan in 1999. Policies of national politicians in relation to Japan's recession-bound economy; Increase in electoral support for Communist Party; Costs of party support.

In this article I carry out a close reading of Nakamoto Takako's book, My Diary of the Anpo Struggle (1963). Nakamoto was a writer and activist who was active in leftwing politics, the labour movement and the proletarian literature movement in the 1920s and 1930s and returned to the movement after 1945. Her published diary recounts her participation in the struggle against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty and her other political activities. The book is a mixture of personal memory and political history and provides us with a distinctive ‘map’ of one person's emotional geography of Tokyo. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I read the public space and streetscapes of early-Shōwa Tokyo through the lens of proletarian writers. I use the conceptual tools provided by cultural geographers, in particular the concept of emotional geography. Activists of the late 1920s co-opted the streets to distribute leaflets and engage in other forms of agitation. Through their actions they attempted to reinscribe the meaning of the streets, extending even to the ceremonial plazas laid out to showcase imperial power. The risks and exhilarations of such activity are vividly recounted in works including Tokunaga Sunao's ‘The Sunless Street', Sata Ineko's poem ‘Leafleting', and Kobayashi Takiji's posthumously published novella, ‘The Life of a Party Member'. Takiji's novella details the dangerous cat-and-mouse game underground activists played as they worked on behalf of the illegal Communist Party and dodged the surveillance of the secret police. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I consider recent homeless activism in Tokyo's Miyashita Park, including the celebration of ‘vacant lots’ (akichi), and what this can tell us about notions of publicness in Japan. We can provide further depth to the discussion of publicness by situating recent activism in the context of the work of historians such as Amino Yoshihiko and Higashijima Makoto and their recovery of indigenous Japanese conceptions of ‘publicness’ and ‘the public sphere’. The implications of formulations of ‘the public’ based around terms such as ōyake/kō and alternatives including muen are examined, as well as meanings historically ascribed to the Zen concept of ‘lakes and rivers’ (gōko/kōko). I also trace Japanese responses to classical Western notions of the public sphere, as well as some challenges to them in Western scholarship, including the notion of ‘counterpublics’. Whereas in Western modernity the bracketing of social inequalities was considered a prerequisite for the deliberative function of the public sphere, in premodern and early modern Japan there were spaces which allowed for the bracketing of differences even where the function of deliberation was not emphasised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understandings of urban space in Tokyo underwent two significant revisions in the 1990s, focused on the spaces of the subway and the street. These revisions occurred around the 1995 subway sarin gas incident and in the revival of street protest in new social movements. The article brings together the two spaces by discussing how one group of sarin incident victims staged a commemorative event in 2005 – the Memorial Walking Care – to re-engage with underground sites of traumatic memory by walking a Underground route above them along the streets. It draws on the recognition in Murakami Haruki's Underground of a violence in Japanese society figuratively and literally lurking beneath the feet; and on sociologist Mōri Yoshitaka's theorisation of the street as a potential site for new oppositional politics. Situating the event within the frames of trauma theory and performance studies, I read the Memorial Walking Care as both traumatic repetition of loss and potential working through of trauma. The underground and the street act as spatial and conceptual markers for the difference between these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A range of issues confronted government officials in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake, but almost immediately they began efforts to resume education. This article examines how educators overcame numerous challenges in order to recommence primary school education and return children to makeshift classrooms in the ruins of Tokyo. Education was viewed as an important means to help restore a sense of normality in the lives of displaced school children at this time of extraordinary upheaval. Educators were concerned not only with the material reconstruction and recovery of schools, but also the physical and mental recovery of children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article extends existing analyses of communication networks in late Tokugawa Japan; it undertakes a case study of the uses a member of the rural elite made of these new opportunities to maintain a network of personal contacts across significant distances. Suzuki Bokushi lived in Echigo Province and is known for his contribution to the writing of Hokuetsu seppu, a well-known account of the region. The personal network he cultivated comprised practitioners of a wide range of arts and collectors of their work, in both Edo and numerous provincial locations. Bokushi himself was a haikai poet and actively involved in the hisseki (holograph) collection boom which increasingly linked amateurs and professionals from the end of the 1700s. Examination of the evidence reveals an ongoing relaxation of the social divisions that were based in part on distance between centre and periphery in Edo period life. The establishment and consolidation of hikyaku commercial courier services linking Echigo with Edo between the late 1810s and early 1830s made a major contribution to that relaxation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the positive effects of re-engaging generations in an age-integrated welfare center in Tokyo, Japan. Reflection of facility's objectives in architecture; Participation out of obligation; Development of situational specificity.