Committee:

Sheldon Garon, adviser
Gyan Prakash
Alison Isenberg
Daniel Botsman, Yale University

Abstract:

City of Commuters explores how commuting became one of the defining aspects of everyday life in Tokyo. For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tokyo was characterized by a pattern of live-in-work that structured the city’s social and economic life. With the appearance of large factories on the suburban edge, and large, highly capitalized firms in the city center, daily movement between home and work became a mass phenomenon. By the early 1920s, Tokyo claimed the largest daily intra-city migration of people in Japan.

This dissertation argues that for many contemporary observers, the emergent commuting lifestyle represented both an aspirational goal and a new source of anxiety. Analyzing discourse among labor scientists, transport engineers, business leaders, government officials, journalists and commuters, City of Commuters shows how Tokyo residents experienced and thought about the journey to work. It traces how these ideas changed across periods of industrialization, wartime mobilization, and high economic growth. From this perspective, City of Commuters reframes the seperation between home and work as an ongoing process – one that introduced new challeges for workers, employers, and transport authorities alike.

As Tokyo’s commuting population grew, so too did the prominence of issues like traffic congestion and long commutes. Across the twentieth century, the issue of defining and creating tolerable commuting conditions in Japan grew from a local consideration for individual companies and workers to an issue of national concern embedded within policy decisions related to regional and national development.

Throughout the interwar and wartime periods, transport authorities created new knowledge about commuter physiologies and behaviors that informed their efforts to rationalize urban traffic flows. By the 1960s, Tokyo residents viewed the city’s commuting problem as part of a host of welfare issues caused by rapid economic growth and advocated for state intervention. This public pressure around commuting conditions compelled unprecedented national investment in Tokyo’s commuter infrastructure. Ultimately, the tides of urban traffic created a state deeply sensitive to the effects of commuting on the body politic and national economy.

A copy of the dissertation will be available for review two weeks before the exam. Contact Lee Horinko for a copy of the dissertation and the Zoom meeting link and password.

All are welcome and encouraged to attend.