Poverty Management and Urban Governance in Modern
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POVERTY MANAGEMENT AND URBAN GOVERNANCE IN MODERN OSAKA, 1871-1944 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HISTORY DECEMBER 2012 By John P. Porter Dissertation Committee: Yuma Totani, Chairperson Peter Hoffenberg Shana Brown Liam Kelley Patricia Steinhoff Lonnie Carlile Keywords: Osaka, Poverty, Relief, Urban Governance, Cholera ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the relationship between urban poverty and local governance in modern Osaka. It seeks to elucidate the strategies and institutional mechanisms through which the authorities in Osaka attempted to regulate the urban poor from the immediate aftermath of the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War. It begins by examining the dissolution of early modern Osaka’s beggar fraternity, the kaito nakama, and considering the impact of the Restoration and subsequent dismantling of the early modern status system on the practice of poverty management and the lives of the urban poor. Following the Restoration, the mechanisms through which the authorities in Osaka attempted to regulate the poor underwent a dramatic transformation. For centuries, the authorities had permitted thousands of the city’s poorest residents to survive by gathering alms. However, in the early 1870s, officials came to view begging as a deleterious practice that encouraged idleness and dependence and stripped otherwise able-bodied individuals of their desire for self-sufficiency. Some asserted that if the practice were allowed to persist, it would ultimately undermine the vitality and stability of the fledgling Meiji state. In order for Japan to compete with the comparatively affluent states of the West, officials came to believe that it was necessary to mobilize the entire populous, including the members of economically disadvantaged groups previously permitted to subsist on the margins of the urban economy. Accordingly, officials began working to transform the poor into productive urban subjects capable of subsisting without external assistance. This dissertation challenges foregoing studies of urban poverty in modern Japan, which emphasize only the coercive and exclusionary features of state policy towards the poor. While moments of repression and exclusion are certainly a vital part of the story, an analysis of poverty management efforts in Osaka reveals that official policy was designed primarily to harness, multiply, and exploit the productive capacities of the poor. Far from seeking their permanent exclusion from mainstream society, the authorities worked to encourage their sustained inclusion into the lower tiers of the urban socio-economic hierarchy through the hygienic remaking of their communities and the reform of their beliefs and practices. ii CONTENTS I. Introduction………………………………………………………………………..1 Collective Resistance and Internal Stratification………………………………….5 Popular Representations of Urban Poverty……………………………………….7 The Historical Development of Urban Slums in Post-Restoration Osaka………11 Historiography…………………………………………………………………...15 Chapter Outline………………………………………………………………….32 A Brief Note on Sources ………………………………………………………..37 II. Poverty Relief and Socio-Economic Integration in Late Nineteenth-Century Osaka Introduction……………………………………………………………………...38 Urban Poverty in Tokugawa-Era Osaka…………………………………………39 The Dismantling of Osaka’s Beggar Fraternity………………………………….45 Poverty Management and Public Relief…………………………………………60 Private-Sector Poverty Relief……………………………………………………78 A Private Work School for the Poor……………………………………………..80 Kobayashi Sahē’s ‘Poor People’s Workhouse’………………………………….82 Life in the Workhouse…………………………………………………………...94 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...108 III. Cholera 1886: Poverty, Disease, and Urban Governance in Meiji Osaka Introduction…………………………………………………………………….111 Cholera and Eradication Efforts………………………………………………..116 Poverty, Disease, and Social Exclusion………………………………………..131 Conclusion: Nagamachi’s Dismantling………………………………………...164 iii IV. Civilizing the Slums: Poverty and Social Control in Early Twentieth-Century Osaka’s “Poor Schools” Introduction……………………………………………………………………167 The Founding of Tokufū Elementary School………………………………….172 The Socio-Economic Structure of Namba Precinct’s Slums…………………..181 Education and Social Improvement……………………………………………185 School Curriculum and Regulations…………………………………………...189 Reform and Relief in Osaka’s ‘Poor Schools’…………………………………201 The Integration of Tokufū School into the Municipal School System………....212 V. Poverty Relief, Social Surveillance, and Local Governance in Interwar Japan: A Case Study of Osaka’s District Commissioner System Introduction……………………………………………………………………..217 The District Commissioner System’s Establishment and Organizational Structure………………………………………………………………………...221 Ogawa Shigejirō and the Making of the District Commissioner System………228 The Duties of Osaka’s District Commissioners………………………………...232 The Character and Function of Osaka’s District Commissioners………………239 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...256 VI. Housing Reform and Urban Governance in Prewar Japan: A Case Study of Osaka’s Substandard Housing Reform Projects, 1927-1944 Introduction……………………………………………………………………..259 The Spatial Composition and Socio-Economic Structure of Nipponbashi’s Hachijūken-nagaya Slum……………………………………………………….264 The Osaka City Government’s “Substandard Housing District Reform Project”………………………………………………………………………....285 Contesting Housing Reform: Local Opposition from the Residents of iv Nipponbashi’s Substandard Housing Districts………………………………....299 Conclusion: The Historical Impact of Housing Reform……………………….316 VII. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..326 v TABLES 1. The Occupational Composition of Hachijūken-nagaya, 1924………………………277 vi ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS 1. The City of Osaka and Surrounding Counties, 1886……………………………….334 2. Osaka’s Four Wards and Hishashinari and Nishinari Counties, 1872…………........335 3. Nagamachi, 1872……………………………………………………………………336 4. Southern Osaka and Nishinari County, Late-Nineteenth Century…………………..337 5. The Nipponbashi Area, 1918………………………………………………………..338 6. Hachijūken-nagaya, 1924…………………………………………………………...339 7. Hachijūken-nagaya, 1928…….…….......…………………………………………...340 8. Post-Reform Hachijūken-nagaya, 1931……………………………………………..341 vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION This dissertation examines the relationship between urban poverty and local governance in modern Osaka (Map 1). Beginning with the dismantling of the city’s early modern beggar fraternity, the kaito nakama, it traces the development of poverty management policy from the immediate aftermath of the 1868 Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War (1941-1945). In particular, it focuses on the strategies and institutional mechanisms through which the authorities in Osaka attempted to regulate the urban poor. At the same time, this dissertation attempts to illuminate the philosophical underpinnings and overarching objectives of public poverty management policies and seeks to understand how popular attitudes about the urban poor and the communities in which they lived influenced the government’s approach to poverty management. In addition, it analyzes the formation and internal composition of modern Osaka’s vast and internally diverse “urban lower class” (toshi kasō). Throughout the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Osaka’s poor lived in densely populated settlements along the city periphery popularly referred to as hinminkutsu, or “slums.”1 1 I have elected to use the term slum in describing the urban districts examined in this dissertation because it is the English-language term that most precisely captures the character of those districts as they were described in contemporary written sources. The word suramu (a direct adaptation of the English-language term slum) is commonly used in postwar Japanese-language scholarship to describe crowded and unhygienic urban districts inhabited by large concentrations of economically disadvantaged persons. While it also appears frequently in a number of well-known prewar publications, including Dai-osaka magazine, in many of the writings published between 1880 and 1945, the word suramu is not used. During the period in question, there were actually five commonly used terms: hinminkutsu, saiminkutsu, hinmingai kikankutsu, and saimingai. The first two terms translate literally as “den of poor people” and along with the third term, hinmingai (town of poor people), were used most frequently between the 1880s and early 1900s. Kikankutsu, which was employed less frequently during this era, translates as “den of starvation and cold.” The final term, saimingai (town of poor people), appears most frequently between the second half of the 1910s and the end of the Pacific War. It comes to be used equally in newspapers, scholarly journals, magazines, and a variety of official publications. Urban geographer Mizuuchi Toshio has argued that the term came to be employed in government publications in the second half of the 1910s as a neutral alternative to terms, such as hinmingai, which increasingly came to be viewed as pejorative. In general, all five of these words were employed to describe specific unhygienic and overcrowded urban districts with large concentrations of dilapidated flophouses and run-down back-alley tenements inhabited by beggars, 1 Through an analysis of the socio-economic structure of a series of slum districts in southern Osaka’s Nipponbashi neighborhood, this dissertation