Friends who have watched Yasujiro Ozu's film "Good Morning" during Japan's post-war economic recovery will have such an impression that ordinary families in the suburbs of Tokyo are full of uplifting atmosphere, and if you live near the railway transportation hub, you can clearly feel the pulse of the times. Local residents may not know that urban planners are already preparing for the Tokyo Metropolitan Area.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Area includes Tokyo Prefecture, Saitama Prefecture, Chiba Prefecture, kanagawa Prefecture, and is adjacent to Tokyo Bay, with an area of more than 13,000 square kilometers and a population of about 41 million. It is this small "one capital and three counties" that can compete with the San Francisco Bay Area and the New York Bay Area, collectively known as the "world's three major golden bay areas", why is this?
The suburbs of Tokyo in Yasujiro Ozu's "Good Morning" (1959)
Let's start with the Edo period in Japan. Edo is the predecessor of Tokyo, in the 17th century, during the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate, Edo became the economic center of Japan, and the civic culture went to prosperity, and when we look at the ukiyo-e paintings of masters such as Katsushige Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai, we can intuitively feel the development of the city at that time, such as the location of the well-known "Kanagawa Surf", which is now in the Tokyo Bay Area.
The "Black Ship Incident" of 1853 also occurred in Kanagawa. U.S. Brigadier General Perry used gunboats to knock japan off the hook. Fifteen years later, Emperor Muhito, who opened the Meiji Restoration, moved the capital to Edo and changed its name to Tokyo, and Japan's road to modernization began.
From the Meiji Restoration to the First World War, Japan introduced a large number of advanced industrial systems from Europe, including textile industry, machinery processing industry and steelmaking industry, relying on ports to build port industry, and a good shore environment laid the foundation for industrial development.
After World War II, Japan, which came out of the ruins, formulated a national development strategy of "economic center" according to its national conditions. Since the road to external expansion is no longer feasible, how to make up for the shortcomings of small land area and limited resources? Japan has chosen to reclaim land and develop three-dimensionally, and 90% of the coastal area surrounding Tokyo Bay has been developed into artificial coasts.
Tokyo City View in Ozu Yasujiro's The Tale of Tokyo (1953)
On the basis of reclaiming land to maximize the development space of the Bay Area, the Japanese government has also used the advantages of the port to plan foreign trade industries. In 1951, the Japanese government promulgated the Harbor Law, which allowed the Ministry of Transport to carry out long-term planning for the country's ports. Specifically for the Tokyo Bay Area, in 1967, the "Basic Concept of the Tokyo Bay Harbor Plan" was promulgated, which complemented the advantages of the seven major ports of Tokyo Port, Chiba Port, Kawasaki Port, Yokohama Port, Yokosuka Port, Kisarazu Port, and Funabashi Port, forming a wide-area linkage, and in the next 30 years, the throughput of the Tokyo Bay Area Port Group reached the top ten in the world.
In order to alleviate the urban pressure on Tokyo in the process of rapid development, the Japanese government has adopted a "industrial dispersion" strategy. From the 1960s onwards, the manufacturing industry, especially the machinery industry, was transferred to the Keihin and Keiyo regions, and the industry of the two regions developed by leaps and bounds, with Ginza as the radiation point, extending the Keihin Industrial Belt to the west (Kawasaki City and Kanagawa Prefecture) and the Keiyo Industrial Belt to the east (Chiba Prefecture).
Keihin and Keiyo industrial belts concentrate steel, nonferrous metallurgy, oil refining, petrochemicals, machinery, electronics, automobiles, shipbuilding, modern logistics and other industries, becoming the world's largest industrial belt, as of 2011, the Tokyo Bay Area has developed nearly 65,000 manufacturing enterprises.
Yasujiro Ozu's "The Taste of Saury", a factory scene after the revival of Japanese industry (1962)
In the 1980s, the industry in the Tokyo Bay Area changed from labor-intensive to knowledge-intensive, and the previous manufacturing "dislocation undertaking" strategy was upgraded to "combination of production and research". As of 2013, the Tokyo Bay Area is home to 263 universities and institutions of higher education, with more than 1.27 million enrolled students.
In terms of industrial services, teaching institutions can continuously export talents to the Tokyo Bay Area, and in the field of research cooperation, the university research institute provides greater administrative authority for the bay area to allocate research resources in the form of independent legal entities.
In addition, the long-term planning of the Tokyo Bay Area is also valuable and sustainable, and will not change due to changes in decision-making, and it is a third-party independent organization such as the Japan Development Concept Research Institute that provides the planning solutions for the Bay Area. The specific development and management involving the bay area is the "Tokyo Bay Harbor Association Promotion Agreement" led by the Port and Airport Department of the Kanto Local Development Bureau of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism of the Japanese government, and all local governments in Tokyo Bay will participate in the strategic development plan.
Today, the Tokyo Bay Area, which was once a wasted "one capital, three counties and two industrial belts", has finally become one of the "World's Golden Bay Areas", providing Japanese experience for the development of the Bay Area in other countries. (Zihua)