Abstract
This paper serves as an introduction to the special issue of “state rescaling Japanese version”. 2010/12 term JARCS research committee featured recent international debate over “rescaling” concept and invited international academics to the 2011 and 2012 annual conferences. I would like to show gratitude to the authors in this issue, Neil Brenner and Takashi Machimura who presented at the 2012 conference, and also to those who worked hard to realize these symposia. Behind this thematic choice lays an intention toward internationalization of JARCS, but also we thought Heisei style state rescaling in Japan should be questioned academically.
To invite readers into this debate whether Japan’s case could be discussed under the rescaling theory umbrella, this paper tries to develop an historical sociology of Japan’s statehood and scales it defines. Evidences suggest that 1940s Japan held multi-scale statehood, but following the WWII defeat, her statehood was rescaled into unitary, domesticated one with all the attentions are concentrated to full development of nature resources within four islands. I argue that the General National Land Development Plan, promulgated in 1961, can be seen as the symbol of this uni-scale, functionalized spatial Keynesianism. This spatial fix was unsustainable any more after the advent of global competition between city-regions, but the state’s attempt
to rescale its regional units, especially the Heisei municipalities’ merger, ended in failure. At this point we need also to theorise submerged effort of machizukuri actors in order to complement the lack of structurist viewpoint on rescaling debate. The machizukuri actors who involves in multi-scale institutions shall illustrate political culture seen in Japanese version state rescaling, which has something in common with other East Asian countries.
