Monograph Series of the Socio-Economic History Society, Japan Economic History of Cities and Housing

The Socio-Economic History Society, Japan, was founded in 1930 and currently comprises about 1,400 registered members-mainly academicians, researchers, and postgraduate students affiliated with universities and research institutions in Japan. The monograph series makes works by Japanese scholars accessible to a wider readership, enhancing the global knowledge of Japanese and Asian scholars in the fields of economic, social, and business history.
 
This book series will present English translations of recent academic research, survey articles, and book reviews carefully selected from the Society’s quarterly Japanese-language journal Socio-Economic History―the leading journal in its field in Japan-and from its other publications. These will be compiled under specific themes, such as energy and the environment, economic activities under the Japanese colonial empire, the consumer society and company system in postwar Japan, and modern global trade and the Asian regional economy. The series will include chapters on economic, social, and business history, ranging geographically from Japan and Asia as a whole to Europe and the United States; it will also include reviews of some recent books published in Japanese and other languages.
 
This book focuses on urbanization as an attendant consequence of industrialization, and sheds light on urban problems such as housing shortage and poverty among the unemployed, as well as the housing and social policies implemented by the central and local governments to address these problems. Through this book, the volume editor and authors convey the view that urbanization transformed the economy and society both spatially and qualitatively, and in the course of addressing various urban problems, prompted the changes of the central and local administration. The book features recent academic works on the economic history of the city and housing, all researched from the perspective of comparative history in Japan.
 
This edited volume includes four articles (chapters) and four book reviews originally published in Japanese and subsequently translated into English. The first chapter analyzes the characteristics of the urbanization that occurred under the land readjustment projects implemented from the Sino-Japanese War to the introduction of reforms after World War II. For the purpose, it focuses on the conflict between landowners and peasants in Japan. The second chapter examines the construction of urban housing following Japan’s defeat in World War II, by focusing on the reconstruction of war-damaged housing; this examination is undertaken from the perspective of creating and distributing private residential space under Japan’s postwar regulatory regime. The third chapter examines the adoption of communal unemployment insurance systems in Wilhelmine Germany, focusing on the Genter system, in which the municipalities paid subsidies to the trade unions that provided their out-of-work members with unemployment benefits. The final chapter investigates the concentration of the mechanical engineering industry in the Paris region during 1939-1958, while focusing on the role of the subcontracting system. Finally, the four book reviews refer to publications in Japan concerning urban and housing history in European countries and in Japan.
 

(Written by Satoshi Baba, Professor, Graduate School of Economics / 2018)