It is becoming very popular among disciplines in the human and social sciences to stress the spatial aspects of the historical development of cities. In particular, studies of urban history in Japan within the fields of architecture, town planning, and Japanese history have been progressing remarkably along with academic advancement related to the general discussions of urban studies or especially those of cosmopolitan Tokyo and Edo. This paper tries mainly to make some reviews of the existing accumulation of studies of Japanese urban history from the spatial viewpoint after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Considering the geographical contribution to these academic fields, geographers have been, generally speaking, ignorant of the importance of this kind of studies. The author points out several perspectives which can be rearranged as a new set of questions in geography, such as the discussion of the technology of the construction of urban space, ideas of the creation of urban space, planning perspectives, who planned, who realized the projects; and also refers to studies of urban development and town planning which placed value on the political and social context. In the Meiji era, because of a lack of rules and acts of regulating and creating urban space except for urban improvement ordinance exclusively for Tokyo of 1889, municipal governments had concentrated on their investment by addressing municipal bonds toward the anticipated future of developing economic sectors such as the construction of streetcars (including widening streets), harbor, and provision of electricity and gas which were managed as municipal enterprise. This establishment of municipal enterprises brings forth many discussions about the financial and political question of who ruled and managed cities. They also constructed streets with streetcar service taking opportunity of the opening of the exposition under the initiative of some influential local entrepreuners. In the next stage of the Taisho era, a real sense of urban politics emerged which was mixed with social welfare, housing and town planning politics or legislation. Some opinion leaders proposed a Japanese version of imported urban politics, and helped a lot to enforce the town planning act of 1919 or so. Actually, the initiative of large municipal governments led to the realization of many projects such as slum clearance, the provision of public housing and many facilities of social welfare. Among them, the reconstruction works after the Kanto Great Earthquake of 1923 were the biggest project of redevelopment of the existing built-up areas by use of land readjustment. This technique of land readjustment was widely adopted by many cities, and played the most important role of developing suburban areas. In Wartime, especially after the outbreak of Chinese-Japanese War in 1937, a strong bureaucracy of the central government emerged in the field of urban, regional and industrial development, which helped the proceeding of war. By the aid of newly developed technical manuals of, for example, constructing new towns or collective housing estates, standardized techniques of construction of urban built environment had been established, and there later became basic in inplementing the nationwide postwar reconstruction works of war damaged cities. Concerning the question the initiative of urban planning projects, significant change had occurred during wartime. In particular, the Ministry of Public Welfare (established in 1938) retreated from the management of housing provision, and instead, the Ministry of Construction Works dominated most of the urban planning section after World War II. This implies the separation and the retreat of welfare and labor administration from urban planning, so that engineers in the Ministry of Construction Works played a central role in carrying out various urban planning projects afterward.

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Political geography is thought to have originated with the writings of Friedrich Ratzel, who defined it as the study of states. That is to say, a state was regarded as an organic entity with a lot of emphasis on its physical elements such as shape, location and climate. Needless to say, it was the introduction of this kind of thought into Japan that led to the founding of Japanese political geography. In addition, the organic theory of the state, as expanded by K. Haushofer in his German Geopolitik also greatly influenced the development of Japanese Geopolitics, Chiseigaku, during World War II. However, with Japan's defeat in the war, the entire field of political geography became to be regarded as something of a taboo by Japanese geographers. After the war, although a functional approach was developed by R. Hartshorne, on the whole, political geography was considered something of a "moribund backwater" in English speaking countries. However, with the development of social welfare policy in advanced countries throughout the 196Os, the role of the state increased significantly. As a result, geographers also became more concerned with the role of the state and at about the same time, the Marxist "Renaissance of the theories of states" gained much ground and became highly influenced in geographical circles. This new approach, as opposed to the more traditional one, was characterized by its focus on the function of a state and its relation to various social groups. However, this kind of new trend in thinking never materialized in political geography in Japan. In fact, most areas that should enter into the field of geography are dealt with by political scientists and there has been an increase in the number of political science studies that deal with the spatial distribution. Therefore, in order to try to reverse this trend, we would like to see a revitalization of the field of political geography, which includes increased studies on the state.

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Spatial restructuring has had much influence in the formation of the Political Economy. That does not only mean the conquest of distance, but the new relationships among regions, markets, and governments. Both the ancient poleis in Greece and the medieval cities in Europe collapsed under the effects of political and economic expansion. Now, in the same way, multinational corporations and banks demand a single universal society, and the dissolution of regions. If we need to control multinational corporations and banks, a global government must be built up. But postmodernism, which is defused through popular culture and the mass media programmes in the advanced capitalist countries, is just the consequence of the newest time-space compression. According to the concept of David Harvey, this compression never shows the birth of a global society or a new post industrial economy. Manuel Castells, on the other hand, admits the importance of the so-called information revolution in transforming the mode of production. It is the informational mode of production that is restructuring society and technology, culture and politics, as well as space and time. So it is in such processes, or places, that he expects that new revolutionary movements should be emerging. With explosive flows of capital and information across national borders, the nation state is increasingly losing the territorial power to integrate communities or adjust conflicts. International unstable movement of capital forces nation states to give up the essential goals of fiscal and financial policies, such as growth, full employment and stability. The flexible exchange rate system increases international adjustment costs accumulatively and distributes them unequally among countries. As a general rule, the small and open country, which is highly specialised and dependent on trade to a large extent, is the most affected in the adjustment process. Some advocate an international industrial policy and a world central bank in order to alleviate and equalize the costs reasonably in space and time. Although the cosmopolitan ideas might be tried to realize in vain, others prefer to take national control over their own national currency on a global scale. In that case, each country must keep public finance in order and each bank must decide whether or not, if required, it will present any information to the central bank which is prepared to be the lender of last resort. That can lead to the peaceful decline of the current planetary hegemony of the U. S., The adjustment of disequilibrium depends on the social control of industrialization and urbanization. Both markets increase and governments can continue to increase wealth and justice on the assumption of the future revival of regional communities. Otherwise we will lose both social meaning and any hope of governability.

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The Japanese alternative geographers, taking a critical position towards exceptionalist conventional geography, have advocated since the pre-WWII days for "geography as a social science. " In an attempt to attain it, those alternative geographers brought the concepts of conventional, non-spatial social science (mainly Marxism) into conventional, empirical geography. Its consequence was, nevertheless, to negate geography as an independent discipline, dissolving it into non-spatial social science or area studies in general In the meantime they created their own comfortable enclave or "critical geography" carved out within the established academic system of geography. Given their insufficient comprehension of the social and economic theories, the emergence of such enclave was inevitable. Compelled by the opening up of the boundaries of social sciences and increased importance of interdisciplinary research, the alternative geographers were put in the position where they needed to contribute to the social science in general. Nevertheless, they then curiously turned back to the conventional paradigms of geography, by reproducing exceptionalism, the concepts of functional and uniform regions (sometimes in a fancy term of "regional structure") or bourgeois location theories, etc. Those social scientists in Japan who began to show interest in space, on the other hand, came to look for spatial conceptions of society directly in the literatures published in the English language, with most of those alternative geographers in Japan left behind. Several books of Yi-FuTuan, for example, have been translated into Japanese but many of them were by the non-geographers. In order to get over this paradoxical situation, the real alternative is needed. It must aim at formulating the robust theory of spatial configuration of economy and society, explaining the socio-spatial processes taking place when material space is subsumed into society, based upon the comprehensive understanding of social and economic theories. This has been the way how geography successfully established itself as an independent discipline among academic division of labour of social sciences in the English-speaking countries over the last 25 years. Japan should indeed be no exception. The main task here is to analyse the socio-economic processes and relations modified through subsumption of various attributes of material space : pristine space and the heterogeneous space with the built environment, created through subsumption of the pristine space into society. Since the author has presented the theory of space subsumption elsewhere already (Mizuoka, 1991), I shall here only outline its framework. Pristine space in principle possesses two material attributes : absolute and relative. The absolute attribute is characterized by the limitless contiguousness and universality ; the relative attribute by the distanciation and uniqueness. These attributes of pristine space "formally subsumed" into society disrupt the normal operation of social and economic processes stipulated in the "one-point" models of society and economy. The social processes to create space then come about in an attempt to overcome these disruptions, in order to regain the "one-point" social processes and relations. The contiguousness and universality of absolute space, detrimental to the exclusive and independent existence of the social agents and groups, are to be annihilated by means of bounding it, when there are other neighbouring groups or agents. The outcome is the formation of a bounded space or territory with its own distinct locality, which eventually configurate together to form a number of vertical strata of the collective absolute spaces. The isolating or distanciating effect of relative space detrimental to the social interactions, on the other hand, is to be annihilated by means of

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Amongst the profusion of theoretical approaches in human geography developed during the past twenty five years, recent surveys have identified three major contenders, positivism, structuralism, and humanism. Positivism is associated with the quantitative revolution which began in the l96Os, and emphasises the analytic abstraction of selected variables, their measurement and manipulation in a set of statistical procedures. In contrast structuralist theory urges that the most important causal processes are not observable. All we see are superficial results of deep-seated structures, which may only be revealed by patient intellectual analysis. Though structuralism is not necessarily marxist, in human geography the two terms have become interchangable in a political economy where the deep structures are identified as the capitalist relations of production. Humanism argues that both positivism and structuralism have inadequate conceptualisations of human agency. Humanists have pointed to the pluralism of people's roles and subject positions, which vary according to class, gender, race, age, and so on. There are as a result a range of human experiences of geographical settings, a variable conjunction of place and identity. So too local geographies are more than economic geographies : the actions of the human subject cannot be collapsed to economic functions alone. These theoretical points of departure have influenced the shape of empirical research. The second part of the paper briefly reviews the literature studying inner city gentrification, that is, the movement of middle class professionals into old, inner city neighbourhoods formerly occupied by lower income groups, a movement with important implications for urban policy as well as urban theory. The initial presuppositions of the three theoretical approaches have led to quite different research traditions as each examines the same phenomenon. In the past few years some cross-fertilisation of these three perspectives has occurred. There is a hopeful tendency suggesting that a more integrated human geography is emerging, incorporating the insights of different theoretical approaches. But if the commitment to theoretical particularism is less dogmatic than in the past, the essential role of theory remains as a tool to shape the direction of empirical research and give it a wider significance.

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