Introduction

This is the first special issue written in English in any academic journal that features the gentrification of Tokyo. Considering the fact that gentrification has been a contested concept in urban studies over the decades, readers may be surprised that this issue has been addressed so late. The term gentrification originates in 1964 (Glass, 1964), and rapidly became a fashionable concept from the 1970s when London, New York, and other cities underwent dramatic urban redevelopment to revamp their dilapidated inner city areas into districts for the wealthy and sophisticated, while evicting existing residents—who were often ethnic minorities, or from the working class or underclass—by raising their rent or using other methods. As this market-driven movement overwhelmed Western cities and as reinvestments in the inner city prevailed, related themes like the growth of “new middle class” (Ley, 1996) or the advent of “revanchist city” (Smith, 1996) emerged to invite other heated discussions. In the 1990s attention turned to on the role of the public sector allied with market power, focusing on “urban justice” and the anatomy of housing and financial market dynamics. While these discussions deepened over time, the definition of gentrification was enlarged to include rural and suburban areas, and even was applied to tourism, retail and wilderness gentrification (Lees and Phillips, 2018). Related veins of research rapidly developed on the dynamics of the financialization of housing using statistical data. On the other hand, there have been critics of the “Anglo-American bias” (Lees and Phillips, 2018: chap. 2) in the gentrification literature, but recent researchers have extended their wings globally to cover East and South Asia, South America, and other developing countries. In the 2010s debates took place on “Planetary Gentrification” or “Global Gentrifications” (Lees et al., 2015, 2016; Mori, 2020), as some researchers resisted this geographical blurring. When it comes to East Asia, the Urban Studies journal covered Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul, Jakarta and other cities in a special issue titled “Locating Gentrification in East Asia” (volume 53, issue 3, 2016). While noting that Tokyo was once again a missing chapter, let us confirm here that the editors pointed out an important commonality in East Asia: “the term gentrification may not be widely circulated in the media and public discourses” but “the process of gentrification itself was not so new” (Lees et al., 2016: 21). The fact that the concept of gentrification was not in common circulation while gentrification-like processes were actually being experienced in Japan was also reflected by the Japan Association for Urban Sociology annual conference in 2016, which resulted in a special issue subtitled: “Why weren't the ‘Jiage’ phenomena described as ‘gentrification’?” (Shimomura and Igarashi, 2017). Jiage is a term used in Japanese during the bubble economy which literary means “the act of raising the price of land”, sometimes using extreme or violent methods to evict existing residents to enable inner city reinvestments. As an answer to this question, in the special issue of the Japan Association for Urban Sociology, Kenji Hashimoto proposed “time difference gentrification” hypothesis. While existing inner-city residents were displaced in the 1980s, it was only after the turn of the century that Tokyo experienced a dramatic inflow of the new middle class. This 10 to 20 year time difference prevented observers from acknowledging the process as a form of typical gentrification. Obviously, Hashimoto's rewriting of his hypothesis in English is indispensable for this issue of the International Journal of Japanese Sociology, and we are grateful that he replied to our request with thick evidence on the transformation of the class structure which he describes in geographical terms in and around Tokyo. Hashimoto's Marxist analysis also provides a new picture of the Japanese class structure, which has not been fully grasped by English readers. His article comes second in this special issue. Takashi Machimura, who is no doubt the most famous of Japanese urban sociologists and now is the president of the Japan Sociological Association, has coined another expression—“gentrification without gentry”—as the answer to “why weren't the ‘Jiage’ phenomena described as ‘gentrification’?”. His article is carefully written to avoid misunderstandings that might result from applying this handy concept too easily. He persuasively breaks Tokyo's half century down into four phases: from targeted redevelopment (first step), through the conversion of state-owned land (second step), to the financialization and evaporation of the city (third step), and eventually ending up with the domination of major developers (fourth step). He concludes that the gentrification concept, or globally common logics, only partially explain the vertical expansion of Tokyo in recent decades. In other words, readers should pay attention to the contingent aspects of Tokyo which were not necessary common to the other cities. State regulation, government-companies alliance, or its “would-be global city” ideology which favors mega-events, are examples of these factors. Rinpei Miura's article also takes a restrained stance on the use of the gentrification concept. Instead he tries to revitalize Henri Lefebvre's classic concept of the “right to the city” to ponder on the meaning of urban life. His discussion is based on a case study of the Shimokitazawa area, where the Tokyo metropolitan government (TMG) and the Setagaya Ward planned a drastic redevelopment of human-scale shopping alleyways and neighborhoods, taking the opportunity of a ministry-funded project to move conventional railroad tracks underground. This redevelopment plan is called the grade separation project (GSP) in the TMG policy documents. Tracing the development of the opposition to and logics against the GSP, Miura describes the process during which the public sphere was formed to redefine the town's own value and to listen to the voices of both tenants and non-residents. TMG was forced to step back after the Tokyo District Court recommended reconciliation between the two groups, although some public works were completed during the TMG's first plan to break up - original ecosystem of the town. He argues that gentrification studies need to capture the creative power of social movements. Asato Saito, the co-editor of Locating Neoliberalism in East Asia: Neoliberalizing Spaces in Developmental States (Park et al., 2011), has scrutinized Japan's regional policy in the context of (neoliberalized) developmentalist state theory. According to his analysis, the Abe administration's regional policy was self-contradictory because Abe was apparently poised to address the problems of the younger generation in rural regions while emphasizing trade liberalization and inbound tourism as a successor of the developmentalist state. Eventually neoliberal power overwhelmed, it seems, which strengthened Tokyo's superiority over the other cities even more. Saito's account reminds readers that state policy has been promoted Tokyo's gentrification (or a gentrification-like phenomenon or gentrification without gentry) over the decades. Having introduced the four excellent articles, I should stress here that the intermingled and contextualized character of Tokyo is the main reason that has prevented global researchers from including this city, which was once called a Global City (Sassen, 2001) in their theories about gentrification. Gentrification (or gentrification-like phenomenon or gentrification without gentry) in Tokyo took a different path from other cities, even those in East Asia, and so first of all, the other editors and I thought it necessary to disentangle Tokyo's complicated context with rich and thick details. Yet the editors could not include other important themes such as the features of ethnicity in the gentrification process, studies of underclass neighborhoods, which have long research traditions (Mori, 2020), or the aesthetic, artist-driven, culturally embellishing aspects of the gentrification phenomena which of course was also seen here (although Machimura's article points out that this was a rare occurrance because the tall building landscape was driven by the logic of financialization). For example of accounts in English that touch on these themes please refer to Aoki (2003) and Sasajima (2013), although there are many other important articles that are written only in Japanese. Also, readers might have expected some descriptions of the realities of Tokyo's city life during the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in the dismantling of urban lifestyles worldwide. Actually, statistics show that a certain proportion of Tokyoites chose to leave central Tokyo to live in less crowded suburbs or the countryside in 2020, but we are not prepared to speculate further on this matter. For those readers who are not satisfied with current issue, please wait for the next issue (vol. 31)—when this journal will be renamed the Japanese Journal of Sociology—for sociological analyses on the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. At any rate, the editors believe this issue is a starting point for including Tokyo into global gentrification debates, and here readers will see that this city still deserves full scrutiny for range of kaleidoscopic nuances

Archaeology · Economic geography · Economic growth · Economics · Gentrification · Geography · Political science · Regional science · Sociology · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Urban Planning and Governance · Urbanization and City Planning

• Global gentrifications

  Open Access•Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin et al.•Global Gentrifications•2015

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• The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City

  David Ley, David H Ley•The new middle class and the…•1997

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• The Global City

  Sassen, Saskia Sassen•The global city•2001

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• Construction et déconstruction des identités de genre

  Catherine B Silver, Marie Ploux•Cahiers du Genre•2001

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• From red light district to art district

  Open Access•Hideaki Sasajima•Cities•2013

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• Homelessness in Osaka

  Open Access•Hideo Aoki•Urban Studies•2003

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