Summary of the October 9 Lecture

"From the Periphery into the Mainstream: Tokyo's Ethnic Landscapes", by Sheri Blake, P.Eng. (Arch.)

In opening the meeting, our President, Mr. George Sioris, expressed his pleasure at being back with us again, and thanked Dr. Suleski for chairing the September meeting in his place. He also called on Dr. Suleski to make an announcement concerning the Society's financial situation. The situation, as Dr. Suleski explained it, is that the Society cannot cover its expenses solely by the income from membership dues, book sales and the like, and has been dependent for some time on donations and grants from various bodies which he named. These sources of supply are now beginning to dry up and so he appealed to those present to provide suggestions about possible benefactors and the ways by which they might be approached.

Our speaker on this occasion was architectural designer Sheri Blake, who had chosen as her topic "From the Periphery into the Mainstream: Tokyo's Ethnic Landscapes", illustrating her paper with slides of her own photographs. She began by describing the new Koreatown that has arisen on Shokuan-dohri, at the northern end of Kabuki-choh in Shinjuku Ward, with restaurants and small factories and stores complete with Hangul signs. It is the first postwar development of an ethnic commercial strip without any prewar base, and also the first in a major urban centre within Tokyo. In the last twenty years the area around Shinjuku Station has been developed as an alternative to the area around Tokyo Station, and a large number of skyscrapers have gone up on the west side, including the new metropolitan government buildings, while on the east side new vertical theme buildings of six to eight floors above ground have appeared, each housing twenty or thirty bars and restaurants and competing with the tiny bars in rundown two-storey wooden buildings in Kabuki-choh. Appropriately enough, the skyscrapers on the western side of the station are laid out on grid-patterned streets, while the eastern side still preserves the density and intensity of an Asian market-place, suitable for a budding Koreatown.

This Koreatown most closely resembles the ethnic commercial strips in North American inner cities, of which Ms. Blake took Toronto as an example. Before the war the population of Toronto was mainly of British descent, but by 1971 this proportion had dwindled to less than half, and there are now eleven ethnic landscapes in the inner city, including, from Asia, Chinese, Korean and Indian, and, from Europe, Polish, Italian and Greek, which have developed in the main along major east-west roads. The city government has encouraged these commercial strips to accentuate their ethnic identity, with the result that you can see great splashes of the auspicious red in the Chinatown, pastel colours in the Portugal Village and wrought ironwork in the Italian areas, the houses of which may have figures of Christ or the Madonna inset into their brickwork. This policy has been criticized by some as reinforcing the ethnic divisions in society, but while these ethnic strips certainly act as boundaries dividing the mainstream and ethnic societies, at the same time they offer the ideal image of a closely knit community, which cannot be found in the suburbs to which mainstream society has migrated. Recently, though, upper-middle class persons of ethnic origin have spread out into the suburbs. One-third of Toronto's Chinese community now lives in Scarborough, and in the last two decades Chinese commercial entrepreneurs have targeted this area, building distinctively Chinese plazas and malls, so that the white population has begun to complain about the disturbance of their once quiet residential community. Nevertheless, ethnic commercial expansion in the suburbs has increased.

The development of the Koreatown in Shinjuku has been similar to this, in that it has taken place in an area with no prewar Korean population and at a time when the immigrant population in Tokyo has increased almost 100 percent. As in the case of inner Toronto, several factors have made the area attractive for foreign settlement. Relatively high-paying, low-skilled jobs are available in Kabuki-choh, close to rundown, low-cost rental housing abandoned by the Japanese but still standing because the landlords cannot afford to rebuild. Another feature shared with Toronto is the fact that the Koreatown fronts a fairly major east-west road, and proclaims its identity by the use of Hangul signs and Korean cultural symbols.

The landscape of this Koreatown forms a contrast with other ethnic neighbourhoods in the Tokyo area. There is an area in the nearby city of Kawasaki inhabited by the descendants of the prewar Korean workers in the local cement factories. On the street now named Semento-dohri (Cement Road) there are small banners proclaiming "Kawasaki Korea Town", but apart from one store designed as a miniature Korean temple there is nothing to mark the area out as distinct from its neighbours. Yokohama has its famous Chinatown, going hack to 1863, established in an area set aside in 1858 for foreign settlement. When the policy granting extra-territorial rights was rescinded in 1899, the Chinese were still not given freedom of movement, for fear they would work for lower wages than the Japanese, so this area remained a Chinese community. It has been twice destroyed, in the 1923 earthquake and during wartime air raids, but has since been rebuilt. However, unlike the other ethnic linear strips it resembles a walled town with symbolic gateways; it is now laid out on a major road, but consists of narrow streets designed for pedestrians. But in other respects it is typical of the Chinatowns found in other parts of the world.

A contrasting form of ethnic landscape is the Western-style housing developments surrounding the embassies located in Tokyo's Minami Azabu and the surrounding area. But though there is a large foreign population in the area, the large international supermarkets and such franchises as McDonalds and Anna Millers are all Japanese-owned, and in spite of the proliferation of English-language signs very little of the business activity is actually ethnically basde. The same is true of the Motomachi area in Yokohama, another prewar ethnic landscape, where the Western exteriors are only a cover for what is inherently Japanese (including the sweet bean-paste in the Western pastries!). And even the Western skyscrapers in Shinjuku have been described as "not like Manhattan at all, just like Japan only fifty stories high." But in one respect the area around Minami Azabu, with its upper-middle class "gaijin" (foreigners), resembles the ethnic neighbourhoods of inner Toronto; it is a self-contained foreign community in what is a buffer zone from mainstream society, provided with all the necessary services including schools or school buses, so that foreign residents can survive without being integrated into mainstream society.

Why, then, has it taken the Koreans 80 years to establish a visible presence, whereas it took the Chinese only three years, and this in spite of the fact that the Koreans have consistently been the largest foreign population in the Tokyo area since the end of the war? The answer lies in the racial discrimination against the Koreans, which is still rampant. Those who are born here are not automatically given citizenship, and even if they take Japanese names they may lose the chance of employment or of marrying a Japanese woman if their identity is discovered. So the fear of further discrimination inhibits the development of a visible ethnic economy. At the same time one may question why the Tokyo-Yokohama area only has one Chinatown to Toronto's five, when the populations in each area are comparable. The Chinese population in Tokyo has increased by 321 percent since 1980, and yet there has been no commensurate increase in commercial activity. It seems that the cause of this has been such factors as the high price of land and the barriers placed in the way of foreigners' getting bank loans. The same thing applies to the Filipino community, which has experienced a 1,000 percent increase over the same period. Another factor is the shifting labour markets, such as low-skilled construction jobs, in which many of these persons are employed, in areas far from their places of residence. (A different kind of ethnic landscape appeared in 1990 when Iranian workers used to gather in Yoyogi park to exchange information and buy and sell goods, but the police soon put a stop to this activity, claiming that the selling of drugs and other illegal activities were taking place. This "fortification of public space", also seen in the moves to exclude the homeless from the underground passages around Shinjuku Station, is similar to the "strategic armoring of the city against the poor" currently taking place in North American cities.)

The importance of the existence of ethnic landscapes should not be doubted. These are not limited to commercial areas like Chinatowns; there are also other "nodal points" to which foreign populations gather. To take the example of Toronto again, the Japanese population there has never concentrated in one residential area, but it is served by 14 religious centres, has two schools, four newspapers, and radio and television programmes, as well as more than 30 organizations and clubs. The nodal points in Tokyo are not so clearly defined, but there are certain areas which are more foreign in character, where foreigners tend to gather, in particular a triangular area in Tokyo bordered by lines drawn between Ebisu, Harajuku and Akasaka (and taking in Roppongi), where the western-style neighbourhoods are most prominent. In the case of Yokohama these areas are Chinatown, Motomachi and Yamate. The attraction of these areas is the abundance of Western-style homes and restaurants and the availability of foreign goods. These observations do not apply to the Koreans, however, not because they are more integrated into the Japanese population but because they wish to live in a specifically Korean neighbourhood, whether or not they were born in Japan. But those born in Japan have been less interested in visiting the Korean ethnic strips, and in fact for some of them their only common nodal points have been certain Korean organizations where they can feel their identity by participating in ethnic activities. In the same way the Chinese too have felt they can always turn to Chinatown to find people of their own kind. For the Filipinos their church is their common focal point, though restaurants are also popular gathering places.

Tokyo has not gone as far as Toronto in establishing ethnic landscapes. However, immigration into Japan continues to increase rapidly, and the creation of urban spaces with distinct ethnic identities looks to be continuing gradually, so that local authorities may need to take these communities into consideration and plan future urban design projects accordingly.

A lively question time followed, in which the speaker clarified that the Shinjuku Koreatown was the work of newcomers from South Korea; there was a division between them and the Koreans born in Japan and also among the ranks of the latter, depending on whether they aligned themselves with North or South Korea (which did not necessarily depend on their place of origin). The meeting closed with a vote of thanks proposed by Fr. Neal Lawrence who began by remarking that it was a good measure of the interest aroused by the lecture that it had prompted more questions than usual.
Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 9", November 1995, compiled by Hugh Wilkinson.
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